Did Wordsworth find forbidden love in the Lakes?
He was so close to his sister that she slept in his bed, went on his honeymoon and even treasured his old apple cores. That’s why, 250 years on, a troubling question persists...
THERE were always signs that the relationship between the late, great romantic poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy was not the normal sibling bicker-fest.
For starters, there was the way she coveted her brother’s half-eaten apple cores, treasuring the teeth-marks and popping the browning remains in her pinny pocket for safekeeping.
‘Oh the darling, here is one of his bitten apples! I can hardly find it in my heart to throw it in the fire!’ she’d rapture in her famous Grasmere Journal.
Then there was her habit of sleeping in his bed when he was away because she missed him so much – not that she got much sleep, of course, because her thoughts were ‘full of William’.
On top of that was the grief she displayed the day before William’s wedding to their childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. To soothe her, William gave Dorothy the ring intended for his wife, and she wore it all night, kissing it, softly blessing it, as she tossed and turned.
Oh yes, and while far too hysterical to attend the nuptials – instead, she lay on her bed in a trance ‘neither hearing nor seeing anything’ – Dorothy joined them on honeymoon, sitting between the newlyweds on their carriage tour of the Lake District.
SO IT was perhaps inevitable that there was gossip about the nature of their relationship. The notion that Wordsworth was being ‘intimate with his own sister’ started buzzing around them, and has persisted ever since.
Indeed, 250 years after the poet’s birth, as the British National Trust stages an exhibition at Wordsworth House and Garden in Cockermouth, Cumbria, northwest England, the questions rumble on. ‘The rumour mill has continued,’ says Zoe Gilbert, visitor experience manager at Wordsworth’s childhood home. ‘We still get asked about it today.’
There is no question the siblings enjoyed an extraordinary bond and many contemporaries noted the chemistry between them.
He, the great idealist, selfabsorbed, fantastically talented, neurotic and moralistic. She, a woman of exceptional intellect and creativity in her own right, who sacrificed everything to support her brother. They lived, worked, talked and admired his poetry together.
Kathleen Jones, author of A Passionate Sisterhood: Women Of The Wordsworth Circle, is in no doubt that Dorothy was in love with her brother.
‘She had all the symptoms,’ she says. ‘William was the centre of her world and she was deeply attached to him in a way that we might not consider healthy.’
But, Jones maintains, it was never a sexual relationship, and she instead puts the siblings’ ‘unusually close bond’ down to the psychological trauma of being separated as young children and reunited in their late teens.
Jones insists they both suffered from ‘genetic attraction’ syndrome – a condition that happens with family members who have been separated at a young age, causing them to be drawn to one another when they meet as adults. Born in 1770 and 1771, William and Dorothy
were the second and third children in a family of five, brought up in a happy, noisy mansion in Cockermouth.
With just 18 months between them, they became constant playmates until 1778 when their mother Ann died suddenly and the family was split in two.
The decision was made for all four boys to stay with their devastated father, while six-year-old Dorothy was dispatched to a more feminine environment – initially Yorkshire, to live with cousins, but later shifted ‘like a parcel’ from one home to another.
To complete the misery, five years later the children were orphaned when their father, John, died, too. Stranded and separate, every Christmas Day – also her birthday – Dorothy would write of her unhappiness at being parted from her brothers.
According to Jones, for someone as sensitive as Dorothy, the childhood bond with her brother was a beacon in the darkness.
‘It was all she could remember of security and love,’ says Jones.
It also meant that, for Dorothy, their reunion (in the Lake District, when she was 16 and William was back for the school holidays) came like a thunderbolt.
For while she was overjoyed to see all four of her brothers, with William there was an extraordinary mutual attraction. Always an odd couple with their angular faces, wiry bodies and tendency towards hypochondria, they set up house together, moving from once place to the next.
As William ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’, Dorothy cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, transcribed his poems and loved him passionately.
While he had other loves – including Annette Vallon, a French woman with whom, in 1792, he fathered a daughter, Caroline – there is no question that he felt deeply for Dorothy.
HE CALLED her ‘sister of my soul’ and would say: ‘She made me a poet. She gave me eyes, she gave me ears.’ He dismissed her constant headaches and weeping as ‘nervous blubbering and stomach trouble’.
Worried constantly about ‘what would become of Dorothy’, he did his utmost to protect her when he became engaged to Mary.
He also agreed to her coming on their honeymoon and when, on the wedding night, they arrived at the first hotel, it was he who took Dorothy off for a walk, leaving his bride alone.
‘Mary was a total saint,’ says Jones. ‘She loved William, but she had known them both forever, so she knew if she wanted William, she had to have the whole package.’ Even during lengthy absences, she was not permitted to write to her husband privately – all correspondence had to be addressed to both siblings, for fear of offending Dorothy or making her feel left out.
But somehow – and who really knows what goes on behind closed domestic doors – a new routine was set with Dorothy settling into the role of maiden aunt, shouldering the roles of nurse (there were five children over seven years), cook, housemaid and, occasionally, even chimney sweep.
There was no time or emotional space for another man.
As she once wrote: ‘Fraternal love has been the building up of my being, the light of my path.’
There was a brief flirtation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge – William’s great friend and collaborator – before the poets’ relationship broke down in latter years.
But while Dorothy was drawn to the author of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, he did not return the sentiment and, according to Jones, Dorothy was too naïve for a sexual relationship.
Regardless, any escape route was fast closing down. Life had taken its toll on Dorothy.
Aged 34, she was less than seven stone and had just eight teeth left. By the time she was 40, she was largely insane and an invalid. It has never been clear what caused her illness. William always put it down to her withdrawal from the opiate laudanum, which she had become addicted to after taking it for her myriad ailments.
Whatever, somehow she clung on for nearly half a century in this state, outliving her brother (who died aged 80) to be cared for by Mary until her death, aged 84.
We will probably never know if William and Dorothy ever did consummate their relationship. Certainly the air around them crackled – with sexual tension.
But, as the speculation continues, we should spare a thought for poor Mary, the third person in that very strange marriage, and surely one of the most patient and understanding wives who ever lived.