Friend, Soulmate and Sister

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth
By Frances Wilson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 316 pages, $30)

Her subtle sense of nature's effects made its way into William's poetry.

Ms. Wilson's previous two biographical studies have unusual, even exotic, slants: The first, "Literary Seductions," focuses on literary couples who find themselves possessed by text and sex, including the erotic memoirists Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller; the second takes up the case of Harriette Wilson, the Regency courtesan who published her tell-all memoirs serially, blackmailing her clients into paying her to stop. (The Duke of Wellington was unfazed: "publish and be damned.") Racy stuff! So what in the world does Ms. Wilson see in Dorothy Wordsworth?

It is true that Dorothy occupies a permanent place in literary history, but that place is often marginal, even literally so. Through much of William's discursive meditation "Tintern Abbey," we think that William is soliloquizing in high-poet fashion but then read, at about line 120: "May I behold in thee what I was once, / My dear, dear Sister." For all that time, as editors tell us in their footnotes, William's sister has been standing there. It is Dorothy, the poet claims, who reflects a picture of his true self: "Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her."

Her sensitive awareness to subtle natural effects were such that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William's friend and fellow poet, considered her to be the equivalent of a perfect "electrometer" – a "fragile piece of gold" able to measure tiny changes in electrical pulses. Both poets relied on Dorothy's observations of the natural world – Coleridge in "Christabel " and William in "I Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud ," with its dancing golden daffodils.