Newlyn, Lucy. William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Contents: Homeless — Windy Brow and Racedown — Alfoxden — Hamburg — Goslar and Sockburn — Homecoming — Dwelling — The Grasmere Journal — The Orchard at Town End — Scotland — Grasmere and Coleorton — The Lake District — The Continent — Wanderlust — Rydal — Home — List of abbreviations — Notes. Bibliography — Index.
“Separated from William and Dorothy Wordsworth in December 1798—the year of the Lyrical Ballads—Coleridge wrote to his friends, ‘You have all in each other, but I am lonely, and want you.’ It was a revealing acknowledgement of the deep, almost exclusive intimacy that had by then developed between the siblings. Theirs was ‘a strange love, profound, almost dumb,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw.’ A suspicion of something illicit in the Wordsworths’ relationship began to circulate in their lifetime, and has had a habit of resurfacing. In this book, however, I am interested in the siblings’ cohabitation as evidence of their intense emotional and spiritual need, which arose out of circumstances unique to their family history” (p. xi).
Review: Cecily Erin Hill, Women’s Writing 21, no. 2 (2014): 278–80.
Second edition (paperback), 2016.
Dorothy Wordsworth 