19. Early Years 23
20. Early Years 26
21. Early Years 19
22. Early Years 16
23. Early Years 36
24. Early Years 31. The original letters have not survived, but these are extracts which Dorothy quoted in her own correspondence with Jane Pollard. She clearly valued the remarks – and was happy to show her friend how much she was loved.
25. Early Years 30
26. Pride and Prejudice p. 120
27. Emma p. 19
28. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors p. 24
29. Annette seems to have written several letters to William but none survive except two which never reached him and lay for years disregarded in a French post office; but the whole tenor of these surviving letters can leave the reader in no doubt of her devotion. ‘Come my love, my husband, and receive the tender embraces of your wife, of your daughter . . . She grows more like you every day. I seem to be holding you in my arms . . . ’ (Gill William Wordsworth, A Life p. 66)
30. Emile Legouis, William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon (London, 1922) p.29
31. Juliet Barker, William Wordsworth: A Life in Letters (London, 2003) p.125
32. Early Years 30
33. Early Years 30
34. Early Years 31
35. Legouis, William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, p. 32
36. This second child was the daughter of William Godwin, an anarchist with whom William Wordsworth had probably been acquainted during his time in London in 1791. The little girl was another Mary, destined to become the wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
37. Richard Polwhele The unsex’d female: A Poem (New York, 1800)
38. Early Years 31
Chapter Eleven
1. Memoir p.186
2. Letters 4
3. Letters 4
4. Letters 6
5. Letters 4
6. Letters 5
7. Letters 6
8. Early Years 39
9. Mrs Henry Sandford, Thomas Poole and His Friends 2 vols. (London 1888) Vol 1 p.128.
10. Sense and Sensibility p. 69
11. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors p.189
12. The original manuscript of Elinor and Marianne is lost and we can only know about it from the book it turned into. But, since the precarious financial circumstances of the Dashwood sisters are crucial to the plot, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they appeared in some form in the earlier version of the tale.
13. Sense and Sensibility p. 10
14. William Shakespeare, King Lear Act 2 Scene 2. The ruthless but apparently reasonable dialogue from line 407 to 452 in which the sisters reduce their father’s number of attendants from a hundred to none follows a similar sequence to John and Fanny’s discussion and it is difficult not to believe that Jane had it in mind as she wrote.
15. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman p.65-66.
Chapter Twelve
1. Early Years 50
2. Early Years 50
3. Wordsworth Trust MS 1992.66.43
4. Early Years 49
5. Early Years 5
6. Early Years 48
7. For details of the Wordsworths’ complex and precarious financial affairs see Worthen, The Life of William Wordsworth particularly p. 206.
8. Early Years 46
9. Early Years 40
10. Early Years 42
11. Quoted in De Selincourt’s notes to Early Years 41
12. Early Years 41
13. Early Years 49
14. Letters 18
15. Wordsworth Trust MS WLMS 16/117
16. John Pinney’s biography online at: www.discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/learning-journeys/john-pinney/hard-times
Chapter Thirteen
1. Racedown was a comfortable home suited to a comfortable gentry household such as William and Dorothy had been born into. Dorothy described their common sitting room as having large bookcases, a marble fireplace, and – that most fashionable of contrivances – a Bath stove, such as Catherine Morland discovers in the bedroom of the dead Mrs Tilney in Northanger Abbey, and which, by its modernity, helps to dispel her notions of an ancient gothic chamber.
2. Early Years 55
3. Early Years 56
4. Early Years 60
5. Early Years 65
6. Early Years 59
7. Worthen, The Life of William Wordsworth p. 114
8. Worthen, The Life of William Wordsworth p. 114
Little Basil’s father dismissed these accusations saying they originated in ‘diseased affections’. But he was in no position to complain about the Wordsworths’ care of his son, for he had failed to pay them for much of the time.
9. Early Years 60
10. Early Years 55
11. The fleet was caught in hurricane force winds in the English Channel after setting sail from Portsmouth in November, with severe loss of life. Fortunately, Tom Fowle had not been on any of these ships; he sailed later on Lord Craven’s private yacht.
12. Early Years 55
13. Worthen, The Life of William Wordsworth p.150
14. Worthen, The Life of William Wordsworth p. 116-17
15. William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere L 177-79
Chapter Fourteen
1. Memoir p.140
2. Letters 71
3. Letters 86
4. Letters 10
5. Letters 91
6. Persuasion p. 48
7. Jane Austen Minor Works (Oxford, 1988) p. 456
8. Sense and Sensibility p.153
9. Letters 79
10. Memoir p.81
11. Pride and Prejudice p.29
12. Pride and Prejudice p.104
13. Pride and Prejudice p.292
14. Jon Spence A Century of Wills from Jane Austen’s family 1705 -1806. (Paddington, 2011). p. 8
15. Spence A Century of Wills p. 18
16. Sense and Sensibility p.7
17. Pride and Prejudice p.161
18. Letters 51
19. Austen Papers p.157
20. Pride and Prejudice p.300
21. Emma p. 305
22. Fanny Caroline Lefroy Family History. Hampshire Record Offices 23M93/85/2
23. Austen Papers p.159
24. Letters 21
25. Austen Papers p.226-27
26. Letters 15
27. Le Faye A Family Record p. 75
28. Named Hastings after her . . . godfather.
29. Austen Papers p. 169
Chapter Fifteen
1. Early Years 67
2. Many biographers adopt the distracting convention of referring to Coleridge as STC. This has its origins in a commonplace teenage dislike which Coleridge developed for his own name. Unlike most adolescents, he did not grow out of the aversion and all his life he liked to be called STC (pronounced something like Esteesee, with the emphasis put, I imagine, on the middle syllable). However, I do not see any reason to indulge this affectation. I shall call him Coleridge.
3. Early Years 70
4. Early Years 71
5. Gill, William Wordsworth, A Life p. 129
6. Gill, William Wordsworth, A Life p. 135. Gill’s quotation is taken from The Ruined Cottage, the poem which William read to Coleridge on his arrival at Racedown and on which he continued to work during the following year.
7. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800
8. Early Years 72
9. Mary Moorman (ed) Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford, 1971) The Alfoxden Journal 14th and 15th February 1798.
10. Gill, William Wordsworth, A Life p. 125
11. Earl Leslie Griggs, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford, 1959) Vol 2 p.393
12. Griggs, Coleridge Letters p.65
14. Holmes Early Visions p. 75
15. Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets (Harmondsworth, 1970) p.53.
16. Early Years 160
17. De Quincey, Recollections p.54. The truth of De Quincey’s account is supported by a comment Dorothy herself made later, in 1802, when she had been caught in a downpour and was provided with dry clothes by a stranger at an inn: ‘ . . . there was a young woman . . . who was kindness itself. She did more for me than Mrs Coleridge would do for her own Sister under the like circumstances . . . ’ (Early Years 169)
18. The Coleridges’ maid, who is usually referred to as ‘poor Nanny’, was becoming increasingly unwell at this time and was probably more burden than help.
19. De Quincey Recollections p.132-3.
20. Beth Darlington (ed),. The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth (London, 1982) p. 110
21. Kathleen Jones, A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets (London, 1997) p. 121
22. This date has been established from sources other than Dorothy’s account. Her journal is confused as to dates and she writes of walking with Coleridge on the 3rd 4th and 5th, which cannot have been the case. Her dating would also be inaccurate sometimes in the Grasmere Journal. Her mistakes may, in part, have arisen from the practice of ‘catching up’ which many diarists employ when they have neglected to write for a while, but it probably also reflects a genuine lack of certainty. Living in an isolated place without modern media, and with newspapers arriving several days after publication, it would be easy to lose track of dates. And, as Dorothy and William were not regular church-goers at this time, they would have lacked even the connection with ecclesiastical festivals which would have structured the year for many of their neighbours.
23. William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned
24. Meena Alexander, Women in Romanticism. (Savage, 1989). p. 7
25. Under the title, The Ruined Cottage.
26. I am indebted for both these comparisons to Mary Moorman’s editing of the Alfoxden Journal.
Chapter Sixteen
1. Letters 55
2. Fanny Caroline Lefroy Family History. Hampshire Records Office 23M93/85/2
3. Fanny Caroline Lefroy Family History. Hampshire Records Office 23M93/85/2
4. Letters 96
5. Letters 8
6. Letters 10
7. Letters 86
8. Letters 11
9. Pride and Prejudice p. 353
10. The uncertainty arises because it is impossible to know whether this particular piece of dialogue belongs to the original draft of Pride and Prejudice – First Impressions – or whether it was inserted with later revisions.
11. Letters 114
12. Austen Papers p.170
13. Uglow, In These Times p.168
14. Gill, William Wordsworth, A Life p. 127-128
15. Gill, William Wordsworth, A Life p. 128
16. Mrs H Sandford, Thomas Poole and his Friends, 2 Vols (1888) vol 1 p.242
17. Early Years 83
18. Early Year 85
19. Early Years 93
20. Early Year 88
21. Early Years 93
22. Lucy Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth. All in Each Other (Oxford, 2013) p. 299
23. Letters 14
24. Northanger Abbey p. 36-37
25. Incidentally, Egerton Brydges provides a link between the social circles of Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth. He was an acquaintance of William Wordsworth’s future son-in-law, Edward Quillinan.
26. Letters 12
27. Memoir p. 157-8
28. Memoir p. 169
29. Hugh Blair Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1763; reprint London, 1812) p. 304. Quoted in Eve Tavor Bannet The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore, 2000) p. 61
30. Letters 50
31. David Womersley, Samuel Johnson Selected Essays (The Rambler No. 4) (London, 2003) p.13
Chapter Seventeen
1. Early Years 100
2. Early Years 101
3. Gill, William Wordsworth, A Life p. 159
4. Early Years 109 In his implied contempt for these professions, Wordsworth seems to be forgetting the occupation of his own grandparents.
5. Early Years 107
6. Griggs, Coleridge Letters vol 1 270
7. Early Years 109
8. William’s contempt for conversational competence in a language, was, perhaps, a defence, an excuse for his own failure to achieve even that level of knowledge.
9. Early Years 106
10. Early Years 103
11. This was the beginning of The Prelude. It was the great work of William’s life – in two senses: he was to work on it for the rest of his life, and it was about his life, a detailed, dedicated searching of his soul, an attempt to understand himself and the workings of his own mind: an attempt to understand the very nature of creativity itself.
12. Early Years 105
13. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford, 1988) p. 91
14. Worthen, The Life of William Wordsworth p. 186
15. Grasmere Journal 1st June 1802
16. Hamlet II 2
17. Letters 11
18. Letters 10
19. Letters 11
20. Letters 14
21. Letters 15
22. Letters 15
23. Letters 18
24. Letters 11
25. Letters 15
26. Sense and Sensibility p.35
27. Letters 14
28. This baby was James Edward Austen-Leigh, who was to become Jane’s biographer.
29. Letters 16
30. Letters 21
31. Letters 21
32. Letters 17
33. Letters 10
Chapter Eighteen
1. Early Years 118
2. Early Years 110
3. Early Years 125
4. Letter from Emma Austen-Leigh. Hampshire Record Office 23M93/70/3/88
5. Though, of course, the crime was not then given that title.
6. For a full account of this fascinating incident see Susannah Fullerton, Jane Austen and Crime (Sydney, 2004) p. 39-43 or Le Faye, Jane Austen a Family Record p. 118-25
7. Austen Papers p.206
8. Letters 23
9. Letters 25
10. Letters 27
11. Fanny Caroline Lefroy Family History. Hampshire Records Office 23M93/85/2
12. Fanny Caroline Lefroy Family History. Hampshire Records Office 23M93/85/2
13. Letters 30
14. Memoir p.185
15. Le Faye Family Record p.135
16. Sense and Sensibility p.92
17. Fanny Caroline Lefroy. Family History. Hampshire Record Office 23M93/85/2
18. Memoir p. 140-141
19. Letters 19
20. Sense and Sensibility p. 95
21. Mansfield Park p. 76
22. Letters 13
23. Early Years 93
24. Early Years 49. Her close relationship with the Hutchinson family would eventually teach Dorothy a great deal about the harsh realities of a farmer’s life. In September 1826 – following a summer of drought – she wrote of the desperate state of another Hutchinson farm: ‘This rain, if warm weather follows . . . may do much towards compensating for bad crops; but Wheat alone is to be depended on for paying rents . . . Mr Hutchinson says that except 60 acres his Farm will yield him nothing . . . Cattle not as valuable as in Spring . . . ’ (From Karl H. Ketcham’s transcription of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rydal Mount Journals p.17). By now she could rival Mrs Austen herself in a knowledgeable discussion of agriculture.
25. Gr
asmere Journal 22nd December 1801
26. Grasmere Journal 17th May 1800
27. Grasmere Journal 14th May 1800
28. Grasmere Journal 16th May 1800
29. Mary Moorman identifies the waxy, dial-like flower as Yellow Pimpernel. Interestingly, this is not a flower Dorothy would have seen in Norfolk where the Scarlet Pimpernel flourishes instead. That she was unable to identify the Yellow Pimpernel, which is exclusively a product of northern soils (and fairly common in Cumbria), is another indication that her interest in, and knowledge of, flowers was not marked in her childhood and adolescence.
30. Sense and Sensibility p.95
31. The same discrimination can be detected in William Wordsworth’s poetry. He writes of farmers, of wagoners and leech-gatherers, not of quarrymen, mill-workers and lead-miners.
32. Early Years 140
33. ‘[N]obody else is named in his Will’ William informed Dorothy when he wrote to tell her of the legacy. (Early Years 125)
34. Worthen, The Life of William Wordsworth p. 206
35. Early Years 126
36. Early Years 140
37. Gittings and Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth p. 105
38. ‘Grasmere Journal 18th May 1800
39. Letters 29
Chapter Nineteen
1. Letters 29
2. Letters 29
3. Letters 30
4. Letters 32
5. Letters 31
6. Letters 29
7. Letters 29
8. Persuasion p. 32
9. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors p. 188
10. Letters 33
11. Grasmere Journal 1st August 1800.
12. Grasmere Journal 22nd May 1802
13. Grasmere Journal 1st November 1800
14. Grasmere Journal 29th November 1801
15. Grasmere Journal 26th February 1802
16. The sources used included an oral tradition preserved in the Coleridge family, some letters from Dorothy herself to Mrs Clarkson which contained Annette’s Paris address, and the birth and marriage certificates of Caroline Wordsworth. (See Legouis, William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon. First published 1922, available in Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints. p. vii – viii)
Jane and Dorothy Page 38