Tag: marriage

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Duffin — Dorothy Wordsworth (1955)

Duffin, H. C. “Dorothy Wordsworth.” Contemporary Review 187 (January 1955): 47–51.

“Even apart from its pitiful ending, Dorothy Wordsworth’s life was a tragedy. No one can blame Wordsworth for marrying, but his marriage to Mary Hutchinson was a betrayal of Dorothy, and the ruin it made of her life was reflected in his poetry. The sight of the gradual death, in Dorothy, of the brilliant happiness that had been hers, and his, before 1802, poisoned his own happiness, and hence the springs of poetry in him” (p. 50).

Web: Internet Archive.

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Maclean — Born under Saturn (1943)

Maclean, Catherine Macdonald. Born under Saturn: A Biography of William Hazlitt. London: Collins, 1943.

See index.

“If, as De Quincey suggests, Hazlitt made an offer of marriage to Dorothy Wordsworth, it must have been in this year [1803], for he  would hardly have ventured to propose marriage to any woman in 1798 [when he had previously met her], when he was penniless and prospectless; and he saw nothing of Dorothy in later years. Yet there is no positive evidence to confirm the suggestion, and all of what we might call negative evidence seems to point to its falsity” (p. 592).

Digital copy: Internet Archive.