Gill gives it to us collection by collection, so we see Wordsworth emerging at publication moments. Stephen Gill’s edition gives us William Wordsworth’s career from the beginning right the way through, and it’s a long career – he started writing very young. Let’s begin with the poetry itself, for which you’ve chosen Stephen Gill’s Oxford Authors collection. He and Dorothy together sustained a poetics of community, in poetry and in prose. Right to the end, I argue, what mattered most to both writers was community. I look at Dorothy’s place in his life, and her presence alongside him as he wrote, providing a much more accurate and nuanced portrait. My book offers a recasting of William, giving his work a completely different emphasis. To me, that is a deeply wrong characterisation of his writing. I’m trying to undo some very entrenched assumptions about William Wordsworth as a sublime egotistical poet, who got his greatest creative impetus from solitude. I used the subtitle to evoke that intimacy, but not necessarily to fall in line with Coleridge’s view, because it seems to me that the Wordsworths’ love for each other had dividends for everyone around them. He says: “You have all in each other, but I am lonely, and want you.” From Coleridge’s point of view, being around the sibling couple meant he felt estranged and exiled from an exclusive intimacy. The quotation comes from a poem called ‘Hexameters’, written by Coleridge to them both. Where does your subtitle “All in each other” come from? It also celebrates the collaborative life of writing which enabled them to recover their communal identity.
My book tells a spiritual story: of their joint pilgrimage to find a settled home, and their re-attachment to the Lake District where they rebuilt their family. Then they were reunited in adolescence, and closely involved throughout their adult lives in rebuilding that vanished infancy. The two siblings were separated in childhood by the death of their mother, and grew up apart. In my book I’ve tried to steer away from the rather boring, orthodox idea that their physical closeness and emotional intensity might be connected with sexual relations. What we’ve got is clear evidence that they had a close, and in many ways very passionately emotional relationship, especially around the time just before William married Mary Hutchinson. There’s no evidence that they had sexual relations. Members of the same family did occasionally sleep in the same bed in those days, and I don’t think that speculations about incest get us very far.
It’s very unlikely that they slept with each other, other than to keep warm.
How much do we know, and what can we say for sure? The first question people tend to ask about this, put crudely, is if they had a physical relationship. Your book focuses on the relationship of William Wordsworth with his sister Dorothy. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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