a gallimaufry

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, by Frances Wilson

We lay upon the sloping Turf. Earth & sky were so lovely that they melted our very hearts. The sky to the north was of a chastened yet rich yellow fading into pale blue & streaked & scattered over with steady islands of purple melting away into shades of pink. It made my heart almost feel like a vision to me.

Dorothy Wordsworth, wrote the literary critic Ernest de Sélincourt, was ‘probably the most remarkable and the most distinguished of English prose writers who never wrote a line for the general public’. I appreciate that is a fairly defined category, but the excerpts of her Grasmere Journal quoted in this brilliant biography reveal a truly great nature writer who has not had her due.

(Silhouette of Dorothy Wordsworth, taken in 1806 when she was thirty-four. From the Wordsworth Trust)

Wilson focuses on the two and a half years of the Grasmere Journal, the pinnacle of Dorothy’s literary achievement, written while she and her brother William were living in Dove Cottage in the Lake District. She is a sensitive reader of what Dorothy writes – and what she doesn’t write – and always works from Dorothy’s own words to discuss Dorothy’s childhood, her life before moving to Grasmere and her life after William married Mary Hutchinson, as well as Dorothy’s own character. The woman who emerges from these pages is complex, passionate and creative: Wilson describes her as a Cathy to William’s Heathcliff.

When Dorothy was six and William seven, their mother died, and Dorothy was separated from her four brothers and sent away to live with an aunt in Halifax. Aunt Elizabeth was kind but Dorothy was never to see her childhood home in Cockermouth again, she wasn’t even allowed back for Christmas. It’s hard to imagine the traumatic effect this must have had on her; it certainly laid the ground for her lack of self-esteem and her need to construct a happier existence through writing. At the age of fifteen, three years after her father’s death, she was sent to live with her grandparents as ‘a professional poor relation’. The grandparents were a ‘joyless’ pair who found Dorothy ‘wild and intractable’; however, Dorothy was now able to become reacquainted with her brothers, whom she had not seen for nine years. She immediately formed a close bond with William, a bond that was to have many of the elements of romantic love in it, for they found themselves in each other.

When William went away to Cambridge to study, Dorothy missed him enormously. Fortunately, after eighteen months she was invited to live with her uncle and his new bride in Norfolk, where she quickly became indispensible as ‘head nurse, housekeeper, tutoress of the little ones or rather superintendent of the nursery’ as her aunt gave birth to a new baby every year. However, she and William corresponded constantly and became even closer. In 1794, aged twenty-two, Dorothy left her uncle’s Norfolk rectory to go for a ‘pilgrimage’, a long walk, through the Lake District, and after this they set up house together in a string of different places, ending in Dove Cottage.

Dorothy began writing the Grasmere Journal for William to read. Far from being artless, her diary entries were the products of intense and accurate observation and careful selection of words. Wilson contrast them with her letters to her childhood friend Jane Pollard. In the letters, Dorothy’s ‘emotions are fashionably exaggerated’; they are ‘so different from the sharpness, shyness, and indirection of her journal entries that it is sometimes hard to believe they are by the same woman’. Wilson notes that occasionally Dorothy wrote two versions of the same day’s events in her journal, evoking quite different emotions. She portrays Dorothy and William’s intense love for each other as symbiotic and feeding off each other. There are echoes of the journals in William’s poetry of the time. Had Mr Mybug been a feminist, he would have undoubtedly claimed that Dorothy wrote William’s poems. The more likely explanation is that William and Dorothy discussed their impressions together before writing them down, or that William read her journal entries and used phrases from them in his own work. Dorothy was valued not only by William, but also by Coleridge and De Quincey, by all who knew her, for her great responsiveness, her sensitivity to what she saw and heard.

(A page from the Grasmere Journal, showing a description of daffodils at Ullswater; the Wordsworth Trust; found here)

After William’s marriage the fire went out of Dorothy’s writing and she seems to have subsided into a more conventional rôle as maiden aunt, helping with the upbringing of the children. Wilson argues that she should not be seen as a ‘victim of nineteenth-century femininity’, yet it is simply impossible not to wonder what her literary career might have been had she had the opportunities of her brother. It does seem at least she has finally received the biography she deserved; Wilson really is an exemplary researcher and writer and as well as looking out for a copy of Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal, I’m keen to read more of Wilson’s work.

casting my vote

Thanks to Brexit, last year I became a Belgian citizen. I couldn’t really envisage a situation in which I, a Brit, would be separated from my Belgian husband and child, but with the British government even then displaying an unedifying mix of incompetence and hostility I thought it best to mitigate that possibility.

Anyway, as a consequence I am now obliged to vote in Belgian elections. Voting is compulsory here, though there is a ‘blank space’ option on the ballot if you don’t care for any of the candidates. If you don’t vote and don’t have a good reason for it, like being out of the country on holiday, you can be fined. Not that this would be a problem for me, since the older I grow, the more important I realise voting is.

Today were the local and provincial elections. There are many political parties here, and they tend to govern in coalitions (I still can’t really understand why the British get in such a froth about coalition governments), but for the first few years of living here I couldn’t really tell my NVA from my CD&V. Keen to cast an informed vote I have been doing my homework over the past few weeks, avidly reading all of the leaflets dropped in our letterbox and rather hoping a candidate or two might pass by so that I could quiz them about their policies. Alas, none did.

There are 33 seats on our local council and so each party is supposed to field 33 candidates, in the unlikely event that they sweep the board. The candidates most likely to win lots of votes are placed high up on the party’s list; those who are thought to be less popular further down. For the smaller parties, I understand, it can be a bit of a scramble to find 33 candidates and sometimes the last few are people who’ve had their arms twisted by a friend or relative after a few pints one Saturday evening. And because it is a small town, people tend to vote for people they know and like.

Clutching my voting card I trotted off with K and E just before lunch to one of the local schools to vote – and not only was it the first time I cast a Belgian vote but it was the first time I had to use a computer to do so! We were first sent to Area 31, where we handed over our ID cards and voting cards and were given a plastic card and shown to a voting booth which contained a rather fearsome-looking computer. I had to push the card into the computer and then use a touch-screen to cast my votes. It was a tiny bit stressful (because computers!) but pleasing too. (I heard K calling that his computer wasn’t working, how glad I was that it wasn’t mine!) A paper slip was printed out at the end with one of those square codey things on it. I left the booth, flailed around another computer and had to be helped by a nice man who showed me what to do with the plastic card, where to scan my slip of paper and where to drop it afterwards. Then I was given back my ID card and my stamped voting card. Success!

I like to think that E regarded me with admiration but perhaps she did not.

(Sunflowers and crabapples in our front garden, nothing to do with voting but the post looked boring with no pictures)

Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey

Many many many moons ago, Oscar and Lucinda won What Shall Helen Read Next? and indeed I did start reading it but despite enjoying it for some reason put it down and didn’t pick it up again until last week. Fortunately, and this is testament to the strength of Carey’s writing, it was very easy to get back into, and I have just finished it.

And finished it in a rage! Jenny was not wrong to warn me in her comment to that earlier post. Peter Carey, how could you? If you will go and create intriguing, complex characters with whom the reader falls in love, then you had better have a very good reason for degrading and killing them off, and I refuse to believe that this was necessary to your artistic enterprise here. It’s not that I insist upon happy endings, by no means, but the ending felt rushed, scrappy and suddenly cruel in a novel which until now had been generous, and what happened seemed a betrayal.

The novel chronicles the childhoods, eventual meeting (they do not meet until page 231!) and subsequent parting of the two titular characters, one born in rural Devon, the other in rural Australia, in the nineteenth century. Brought together by a passion for gambling, their great endeavour is to create and ship to the outback a glass church (and they turn this plan into a wager as well), an airy dream made solid, impractical but beautiful, a triumph of belief over practicality. The novel draws together the ways in which life is a game of chance; from religion (‘We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.’) to love, business to conception, glass-blowing to meeting our future spouse. Gambling gives one the feeling, fleeting, of power and control, of harnessing Fortune to one’s own desires. The end of the novel, in which luck runs out in every way, suggests that this is all a gamble we are destined to lose. We may seem to float along the surface but eventually we will sink. (I found that disappointing.)

Yet still I loved this novel, and I loved it for the characters and for Carey’s writing, which is dry and witty and perfect. He has an amazing talent for juxtaposing elements in a description to bring out their oddness, he studs his prose with precise and unexpected metaphors and he has an ear for the droll in how people speak and behave. I could quote endlessly. Here is how Theophilus, Oscar’s father, sees the boy Oscar: ‘His son was long-necked and delicate. He was light, airy, made from the quills of a bird. He was white and frail. [...] The eyes were so clean and unprotected, like freshly peeled fruit.’ And here is Hugh Stratton’s face: ‘[it] showed, on closer examination, all the fine marks of pain and disappointment that buttered rum could not smooth over’. Here is Theophilus himself: ‘He was a sensualist who believed passionately that he would go to heaven, that heaven outshone any conceivable earthly joy, that it stretched, a silver sheet, across the infinite spaces of eternity.’ And here is Elizabeth, Lucinda’s mother, at her husband’s graveside: ‘But it was anger, not grief, that was her dominant emotion. It lay there like a poacher’s trap ready to snare the unwary.’ I will forgive a lot for writing like this.