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Once reunited, they embarked on a remarkable experiment in domesticity and writing, one to which both siblings, their friends, and (later) Wordsworth’s wife, Mary, were devoted. The orphaned Wordsworth did not see his sister again until they were both grown up. That sense had its origins in the early loss of his parents on the one hand, and in his poetic vocation on the other. Wordsworth emerges from this comprehensive and absorbing study as a man whose sense of purpose and duty steadily grew from youth to old age. One of the many enjoyments of Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth: A Life is the quiet pride it communicates in a job well done.
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Rather, he sees in the five celebrated “Lucy” poems – a series of works concerning a young girl who has died, composed between 17 – coded references both to Caroline and Dorothy, expressing the author’s fears for the loss of one or both of them but also in some sense steeling himself to bear it. Andrew Wordsworth stops short of suggesting, as others have done, that the connection may have been incestuous.
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But this can scarcely be said to constitute a “secret” Wordsworth doesn’t appear to have felt burdened by his feelings towards her, nor did he try to conceal them. It is also true that he enjoyed an intensely and unusually loving, creative relationship with his sister Dorothy. The latter might justly be described as a secret, since knowledge of Caroline Wordsworth’s birth in revolutionary France did not become public until seven decades after Wordsworth had died. The “well-kept secrets” to which Andrew Wordsworth (a descendant) alludes in his title are, first, the poet’s “true feelings towards his sister”, and second, “the existence of his illegitimate daughter”.
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Wordsworth thought one of the best ways to put off would-be biographers was to claim that virtually nothing had ever happened to him. But as these three studies make plain, there is more than one way to tell the story of a life.Īlthough his verse autobiography tracks the sources of a poet’s character and imagination, in real life its author tried just as strenuously to keep himself hidden from view. No biographer could hope to compete with the sheer audacity and originality of Wordsworth’s 14-book blank verse account of what had made him a writer and a man. J ames Boswell started his biography of Dr Johnson on an anxious note: “To write the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others,” he confessed, “may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.” How presumptuous, then, must the biographer of William Wordsworth feel? Not only is he one of the greatest of all English poets, but in The Prelude, largely unpublished until after his death, he excelled all mankind in writing the history of his own life – or rather, what he called “the growth of a poet’s mind”.