The Lake Poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, have become a literary myth and we are used to looking at the Lake District landscape through its romantic prism. But for their sisters, wives and daughters the view was very different. The Wordsworths lived at Grasmere, the Coleridges and Southeys twelve miles away at Keswick and the women created a kind of extended family that kept the group together long after the men had ceased to be friends. Based on necessity, it was far from the harmonious rustic idyll of the myth. Dorothy Wordsworth’s consuming love for her brother William forced Mary, his wife, to compete for her husband’s affections for more than forty years. When Coleridge fell in love with Mary’s sister, Sarah Coleridge found herself abandoned with three small children, forced to live on the charity of her brother-in-law Robert Southey.
For the daughters, the ‘legacy of genius’ was equally destructive. Dora Wordsworth was sent to boarding school at four to learn to become ‘a useful girl in the family’ and was not allowed to marry the man she loved until she was thirty-seven and dying from TB. Her childhood friend, the young Sara Coleridge, had to fight disapproval, domestic conflict, unwanted pregnancy, depression, opium and morphine addiction to carve out a career as a writer and editor of national standing.
Their letters and journals form the basis for an illuminating new account of their interconnected lives – their passionate attachments, petty jealousies, the deaths of children, the realities of chronic ill health and barbaric medical practice. They also contribute to a fuller understanding of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey as all-too fallible human beings.
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Kathleen Jones was born and brought up on a hill farm in the English Lake District. She spent some years living in Africa and the Middle East, where she worked in broadcasting. She is a poet, biographer and novelist, whose subjects include Katherine Mansfield, Catherine Cookson, Christina Rossetti, and the pioneering 17th century writer Margaret Cavendish. Her account of the lives of the women associated with the Lake Poets, ‘A Passionate Sisterhood’ was a Virago Classic. Kathleen worked in broadcast journalism and is the author of two novels and a collection of short fiction. She has taught creative writing in a number of universities, is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and in 2012 was elected a Fellow of the English Association for services to literature. She has also published four collections of poetry and a travel journal, ‘Travelling to the Edge of the World’. Kathleen lives in the Lake District with her partner, who is a sculptor.
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