Volume 56, Number 16 · October 22, 2009
The Dear, Dear Friend
By Frank Kermode
The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life
by Frances Wilson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 316 pp., $30.00
The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals
by Dorothy Wordsworth, edited and with an introduction and notes by Pamela Woof
Oxford University Press, 316 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The Wordsworth family was gentlemanly. John W. Wordsworth, father of the poet and three more sons, as well as a daughter, Dorothy, was an attorney and the agent of a rapacious magnate who, on the father's early death, declined to pay his children a large sum that had been due to him. Since their mother had also died, the whole family now consisted of orphans. William, the second child, was thirteen years old; Dorothy was twelve. Their poverty did not prevent William from attending a good grammar school and, later, with the support of an uncle, St. John's College, Cambridge; but it did keep Dorothy on the move from one relative to another. She attended two different schools in Halifax, Yorkshire, lived above a shop in Penrith, and was taken in by a clergyman uncle in Norfolk. She was granted a glimpse of high life when this uncle became a canon of Windsor and lived in Windsor Castle with his family for three months in 1792, when Dorothy was twenty-one.
Review, 3427 words
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