Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  Frances Wilson, noting the close identification which Dorothy felt with William has likened their attachment to that of Heathcliff and Cathy, even suggesting that when Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights she may have been influenced by the account of the Wordsworths published in Taits Edinburgh Magazine in 1839.37 ‘I am Heathcliff’, declares Cathy. ‘He is more myself than I am.’ Wilson believes that the Wordsworths’ love, like that of Brontë’s characters, was elemental and asexual. ‘What Dorothy Wordsworth and Catherine Earnshaw experience is depersonalising, dematerialising, and unsexing’, she writes.

  However, it is difficult to connect this account of the Wordsworths’ relationship with the tender, gradual fall into love which can be traced in the letters Dorothy wrote between 1791 and 1794. Dorothy and William had lived together until Dorothy was six, but after that they were separated. They did not grow up together as Cathy and Heathcliff do; they did not, ‘evolve from childhood inseparability into a hybrid . . . ’38 Their reunion as teenagers was followed by a period of getting to know one another, a period during which William ‘courted’ Dorothy.

  The young man Dorothy described as having ‘a sort of violence of Affection . . . which demonstrates itself . . . when Objects of his affection are present with him, in a thousand almost imperceptible attentions to their wishes,’ does not sound much like a Heathcliff! Nor does the ‘Delicacy of Manners’, which Dorothy also attributed to her brother, call to mind the brutal master of Wuthering Heights. That rather suggests one of Jane Austen’s more sensitive heroes – Colonel Brandon, or Mr Knightley perhaps.

  Frances Wilson believes that the ‘physical expression [of their love] would have been of no interest’ to Dorothy and William.39 But they were two young, healthy people enjoying a deep companionate love. The evidence of Dorothy’s letters and journals suggests that it was a gentle, individual love – not that powerful but disturbing emotion that Brontë’s heroine likens to ‘the eternal rocks . . . a source of little visible delight, but necessary.’ Dorothy took emotional, intellectual and physical delight in her brother’s company.

  In 1954 an intrepid scholar (F.W. Bateson) found evidence in William’s poetry for an erotic love of the poet for his sister – and the world of literary studies was outraged. It was felt that the suggestion somehow tainted Wordsworth and his work; an interest in it was merely prurient. The idea that Dorothy might have inspired (or felt) desire at Dove Cottage was as abhorrent to mid-twentieth century academics as it would have been to gentlemen of the early nineteenth century, like Carlisle, who preferred to think of unmarried women drooping and degenerating after the age of twenty-five, rather than maintaining a subversive and disturbing sexuality.

  In the Grasmere Journal, moments of tenderness, happiness and great sadness follow one another, overlaying and transmuting into each other. At times, Dorothy’s love for William seems to hurt her.

  ‘Then we sat by the fire’, she wrote on one occasion, ‘and were happy only our tender thoughts became painful.’40And, ‘got into sad thoughts,’ she wrote on 5th March 1802, ‘tried at German but could not go on – read [Lyrical Ballads] – Blessings on that brother of mine!’41 Then, a few days later: ‘William was reading in Ben Jonson – he read me a beautiful poem on Love. We then walked. The first part of our walk was melancholy . . . ’42

  Dorothy is acknowledging a confusion of feelings, but offering no explanation. On 28th January 1802, the journal says, ‘We were both in miserable spirits,’ and conjures a picture of unease in Dove Cottage (where sounds carried so easily from one part of the house to another). That night Dorothy tried to sleep in her room downstairs, while the floorboards over her head creaked with her beloved’s restlessness: ‘William out of spirits and tired. After we went to bed I heard him continually, he called at ¼ past 3 to know the hour.’

  William would sleep badly until his marriage – which was why Dorothy frequently read to him: to soothe him into sleep like a restless child. In fact, in most of the moments of physical closeness between the two, Dorothy’s role seems to be that of a comforter. One line which startles modern ears occurs on 31st January 1802, when she writes: ‘I petted him on the carpet’. But this was one of the many occasions on which William felt unwell, and the word petted, which now has a sexual charge, was probably used in an older sense of cosseted or made a fuss of.

  When composition of The Pedlar was going badly, Dorothy must read Milton or Spenser until William slept. And, on other occasions, we hear of William resting his head on Dorothy’s shoulder, or reaching out to touch her as they sit ‘deep in silence and love’. It does not seem to have been Dorothy who needed the reassuring contact, or soothing embrace.

  By January 1802 William was keeping his sister awake with his nocturnal pacing and on 17th March he was still restless. On that night, after they had both gone to bed, ‘he came down to me and read the Poem to me in bed.’

  By the beginning of the summer William’s sleep patterns were very irregular. ‘I sate up a while after William –’ Dorothy wrote on 19th June, ‘he then called me down to him43 . . .  I read Churchill’s Roscaid. Returned again to my writing and did not go to bed till he called to me . . . ’ The passage again conjures a sense of unease and evokes the closeness of the cottage where only floorboards divided their bed-chambers. But this passage ends on a delightful note of tenderness and acceptance: ‘In a little time I thought I heard William snoring, so I composed myself to sleep – smiling at my sweet Brother.’ It is a very special kind of love which can find a man’s snoring endearing!

  The next night he needed her again: ‘ . . . Wm went to bed. I sate up about an hour. He then called me to talk to him – he could not fall asleep.’

  The picture the journal evokes in the spring of 1802 is of an intense and slightly unstable love, in which William was the needy party who must be reassured by his devoted sister. Those beautiful arrested moments when the couple sat together, touching and silently loving, ordinary life suspended, argue most strongly against a consummated relationship. It is unlikely that a woman in a full sexual relationship would find such deep significance in the resting of a head on her shoulder or the touch of a hand.

  It also seems unlikely to me that, had she been racked with physical desire for the man who sat beside her, Dorothy could have found such an exquisite pleasure in these moments, moments which seemed to supply all the physical contact she needed from her beloved.

  Something was making Dorothy uneasy and unhappy. For some reason she felt melancholy when William read a love poem to her and the sharing of tender thoughts could become painful. Something, even in the journal’s very first entry, had filled her heart to overflowing so that she could find relief only in tears.

  I believe there may have been more at work here than Dorothy’s growing realisation that her devotion to William and his work meant the sacrifice of her own chance of having children. The clue perhaps lies in the fact that it was William who initiated contact on those disturbed, disturbing nights when he and Dorothy, separated in their own rooms, but still keenly aware of one another’s presence, lay awake and listening.

  Years later, in a very tender love-letter written to his wife during a time of separation, William would write of the sexual longings he suffered at this time and describe how they had made him ill, before gently assuring her that ‘I never suffered half as much as during this absence from you’.44

  As these later letters to his wife, and his impetuous affair in France, prove, William Wordsworth was a man with strong sexual impulses, who found it a hardship to control those impulses. During the early years at Dove Cottage he needed and loved his sister deeply. And I believe that it was his sexual feelings, rather than her own, that caused Dorothy’s outbursts of weeping and unhappiness.

  William also had a problem which has generally been accounted rather unimportant by his biographers. He was anosmic. ‘With regard to Fragrance,’ wrote Christopher Wordsworth in his memoir of his uncle, ‘Mr Wordswo
rth spoke from the testimony of others: he himself had no sense of smell.’45 And, ‘Wordsworth has no sense of smell . . . ’ wrote Robert Southey in 1822. ‘He has often expressed to me his regret for this privation.’46

  This privation might have been a tragedy for William, not only because it cut him off entirely from one aspect of the natural world which he had now (under Dorothy’s influence) grown to love as dearly as he had in boyhood. For most of us it is strange – hard to comprehend – that when he strode the fells he did not catch the scents of peaty earth and damp bracken, enjoy the fragrance of honeysuckle weaving its way through the air on summer evenings, or smell the wet rock and moss of the waterfalls he admired; but there may have been an even more distressing consequence for him – and for Dorothy.

  Psychologists researching the Westermarck Effect – that mechanism which usually protects us from sexual attraction to our close kin – have attempted to answer the question: how do we identify the family members to whom we feel sexual aversion? And their research suggests that the trigger is olfactory.47

  For most of us our close relatives (or those with whom we have lived as children) just do not smell sexy. It is easy to see how useful such a protection might be; it may well be the foundation of taboos against close-kin marriage which occur in nearly all societies. Its absence would be deeply distressing and confusing, not only to an anosmic individual, who had developed a close and sustaining relationship with his sister, but also to the devoted sister with whom he shared his home.

  Without this simple, natural protection, William may well have found the moral demands of society in harsh conflict with his own most powerful feelings as, driven by a strong, healthy sexual impulse his thoughts turned naturally to the woman he loved – and were unchecked by the usual control that nature imposes.

  Dorothy had achieved a home in which she was central and for the last six years she had struggled to provide all the support William needed. She identified so closely with him that sometimes the boundaries between them blurred. Now he was deeply unhappy. She was, in a sense, the cause of his unhappiness, and yet she could not help him. For them, of course, the problem would have presented itself, not in psychological or scientific terms, but in guilt, confusion and anxiety.

  It is possible to see now why that love poem of Ben Jonson’s might have been distressing to them both. Stephen Gill has identified the poem which William read to Dorothy on 9th March 1802 – the poem which resulted in a melancholy walk – as the Epode which forms part of Ben Jonson’s ode To the Forest (See Appendix 2).

  In this poem Jonson distinguishes chaste love – which is ‘gentle’ and ‘divine’ from ‘blind desire’ which is ‘armed with bow, shafts, and fire’. He writes of the danger when ‘our affections do rebel’, and, forcefully urging chastity upon his readers, he ends with a dire warning:

  ‘Man may securely sin, but safely never.’

  Even secret sins are found out. Here was a thought that would certainly be enough to make William and Dorothy’s walk melancholy. And this poem which Dorothy listened to at Dove Cottage’s fireside, urged a degree of restraint, far beyond that which Elinor Dashwood recommends to her sister. Jonson declared that our physical senses – our most basic impulses – should be subject entirely to our will:

  ‘Tis the securest policy we have

  To make our sense our slave.’

  This philosophy was a world away from Dorothy’s youthful conviction that ‘all is contemptible that does not spring immediately out of an affectionate Heart’.

  Twenty-One

  Very Capable of Loving

  Jane Austen – though she was unmarried and had now passed the apparently critical age of twenty-five – was neither drooping nor degenerating. A gentleman who met her about this time described her as ‘fair and handsome, slight and elegant, but with cheeks a little too full.’1 Fulwar William Fowle (the son of one of her father’s pupils) would remember her in her early thirties as ‘certainly pretty . . . lively & full of humor – most amiable – most beloved . . . ’2

  It sounds as if she was still a sexually attractive woman, and Jane does not seem to have suffered from Dorothy’s notion that men found her unappealing. But she does not seem to have been happy in her new home. Bath was a place in which it would have been particularly difficult to escape from society’s expectations of a woman as the ‘Vehicle thro’ which the human Species should be propagated’. The town was an important stall on the Georgian marriage market and a young woman’s business there was to be attractive.

  The novelist Tobias Smollett brought his heroes to Bath in search of rich heiresses, while the heroines of many female writers were excruciatingly aware of their role as commodities. Mary Ann Hanway wrote of a young woman ‘ . . . produced for admiration in Bath seasons, dragged from one fashionable watering place to another, evidently to be disposed of to the highest bidder.’ The dancing, chatting and ‘sitting down together’ of a ball, which had delighted Jane at twenty, had their darker side. It depended rather on your point of view. Charlotte Smith wrote in Montalbert: ‘Dragged to a scene, where she considered herself exposed as an animal in a market to the remarks and purchase of the best bidder, it was with some reluctance that Rosalie entered the ballroom.’3

  Whether she liked it or not Jane would have been considered open to offers. And, though she was still attractive, now that she had passed the mid-point of her twenties, her options (like Dorothy’s) would have seemed to be narrowing. If she was to find a husband, marry and have a family she did not have a great deal of time left. However, before she left Steventon, she had already shown signs of outgrowing her girlish enthusiasm for dances and an impatience with the duty of always looking her best (remember those caps which saved so much time and effort over hairdressing).

  Within days of arriving in Bath she was at the penultimate ball of the season having ‘dressed myself as well as I could, & had all my finery much admired at home’. She does not say in the description she sent to Cassandra whether she entered the ballroom with reluctance or anticipation, but noted that, though the dance was ‘shockingly thin for this place, there were people enough I suppose to have made five or six very pretty Basingstoke assemblies.’4

  Since her arrival in Bath, Jane had been making an effort to be positive about her new life. Writing to inform her sister that ‘Bonnets of Cambric Muslin . . . are a great deal worn’ and lamenting that ‘Bath is getting so very empty . . . ’, she succeeded in sounding more like a fashionable young lady gone up to the resort town to enjoy herself than a woman transplanted against her will.

  This ball’s chief interest, however, was that got from observing a ‘famous adulteress’, Miss Twisleton, who was ‘rather quietly & contentedly silly than anything else’. Another entertainment was watching a Mrs Badcock who ‘thought herself obliged to . . . run round the room after her drunken Husband. – His avoidance, & her pursuit with the probable intoxication of both was an amusing scene.’

  It sounds as if Jane spent her evening more as a novelist observing and gathering material, than a marriageable young lady on the look-out for attractive men. She does not mention dancing herself. Perhaps she was not asked. That would have been a painful experience and a reminder that, though she might still be ‘fair and handsome’, she was too poor to attract much interest from men.

  News of the sale of family possessions now going on at Steventon confirmed just how poor she was. ‘Mary,’ she complained, ‘is more minute in her account of their own Gains than in ours.’5 As the sale of goods brought less than expected, she could not help but compare her own losses with the advantages that Mary and James had got from the retirement arrangements: ‘The Whole World is in a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expence of another.’6

  Her complaints cannot be traced for long. Just two weeks after that ball a silence falls over Jane’s life. The next letters that she wrote did not survive Cassandra’s censorship, and we do not hear her voice again
for more than three years. Then, after just one letter written in 1804, the silence resumes for another year. All that we know about this period in Jane’s life is that she continued to live in Bath with her family, taking frequent visits to relations, and spending holidays by the seaside, usually in the late summer or autumn. Since Cassandra destroyed the intervening letters it is reasonable to assume that they contained more complaints. And Jane complained when she was unhappy.

  She seems to have kept her spirits up when they first arrived in Bath by hoping she would be able to continue with her novels once the family had found a home of its own. During the early weeks of house-hunting she described one house they looked around (but did not rent) as having an ‘apartment over the Drawing-room [which] pleased me particularly, because it is divided into two, the smaller one a very nice sized Dressing-room, which upon occasion might admit a bed.’7 This little dressing-room, only occasionally used as a bedroom, sounds very much like the writing space at Steventon which she had lost.

  These plans came to nothing. Even after she had escaped her aunt’s house and was established in a home with just her sister and parents, Jane failed to escape into that world of work and imagination which might have given her some relief from Bath’s milieu of balls and husband-hunting.

  In his memoir Austen-Leigh writes that ‘nothing which the public have seen, was completed’ during the time at Bath.8 Many dedicated writers find that – once established – the habit of writing becomes necessary to their mental well-being. It is easy to see how a downward spiral might have been established, with discontent preventing Jane from writing and the inability to write making her more discontent. The end of all this may well have been depression.