Rate this book

The Ballad Of Dorothy Wordsworth. Frances Wilson (2009)

by Frances Wilson(Favorite Author)

3.49 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0571230482 (ISBN13: 9780571230488)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Faber & Faber

review 1: I had some moments of doubt about this one. Frances Wilson writes with vast assurance about the murky depths of Dorothy Wordsworth's mind even while admitting that Dorothy herself had no idea what was going on there. In a sense, she's trying to have it both ways: she portrays Dorothy as an unstable, permeable membrane of a person, a woman without a clear identity, and yet she gives Dorothy a vivid and legible self: throughout the book, she speculates in great detail about what exactly D was thinking and feeling. She's very sure of herself. At many places in the text, she gets quite snippy about the speculations of previous biographers of the Wordsworths, as if only she has the psychological penetration to comprehend these tangled relationships of more than 200 years ago. B... moreut perhaps she does. Her scholarship is impressive. She presents some new sources of material about Dorothy, and she weaves a great tangle of letters, journals, poetry and prose from Dorothy and the Wordsworths' whole circle of family, friends, and enemies, into a compelling tapestry of D's everyday life. This is her job as biographer, to bring a life to life, and she does it. She convinces me that she has good evidence for her version of D's life--mostly her inner life. So I decided to cast my reservations aside and read the book like a novel, to experience it as I would a movie based on D's Grasmere journals, i.e. to give Wilson some leeway and quit holding her feet to the fire. After all, there's no proving she's wrong. There's no proving she's right either, of course. So I went along for the ride. She's a fine writer who can build a story out of mere fragments, and I admire that. I'll be going to Grasmere again this September, and I'll see it through new eyes. Not Dorothy's, but she'll be tenderly in my mind.
review 2: I was somewhat disappointed by this book. I bought it because I heard the author interviewed on NPR, and I've always wanted to know more about Dorothy's diaries and her influence on her brother William's poetry. While I did learn a good deal about this brother-sister relationship, and while there were satisfyingly ample excerpts from Dorothy's Grasmere journals, the biographer has that annoying (and all-too-common) habit of presuming to know exactly what was going on in a long-dead person's mind at any given time and what their acts and jottings "really" meant. After a while I didn't especially believe anything Wilson was telling me; I just read for the indisputable facts. Also, I was misled by the author in her interview. Both she and the book jacket suggest that Dorothy had a breakdown when her brother got married (their sibling closeness had been quite marriage-like), after which this formerly lively woman became a mad invalid in the attic. This breakdown amounts to about five minutes (literally) of prostration on her bed as the couple returns from church. After that, she gets up and is quite cheerful for about thirty years. Her madness occurred in her sixties and seems to have been a sort of early Alzheimers or something of mixed biological and psychological genesis. less

Download links for: The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. Frances Wilson

Advertising