A Passionate Sisterhood: Women of the Wordsworth Circle

The book is a treat for those interested in the history of everyday domestic life, especially female life. The readers learns a great deal about the normal events of courtship, marrying, friendship, birthing, raising children, educating them, keeping house, caring for the sick, and mortality, as well as the values and standards of conduct that existed in the past, some different from now, but some the same. It is all made more fascinating in that it is about the women of the famous poets: the wives Sarah Coleridge, Mary Wordsworth, and Edith Southey, and the sister Dorothy Wordsworth, and the daughters. The book has a lovely gossipy quality. We learn about the characters and relationships, what they thought of each other, what they liked and disliked. I am sure they never imagined that their lives would be the subject of a book.

In this book, Kathleen Jones provides excellent insight into the lives of the women involved with the early English Romantic poets (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey). The reader is struck at the difficulty of these women's daily lives, allied as they were (through marriage or sisterhood) to men whose reputations were growing at such a rate that they often failed to provide their families with the emotional support one might have expected. Of course, such a comment may reflect this reader's contemporary expectations, but surely Coleridge's abandonment of his family, for example, is shocking in any era. Sara Coleridge and the two Dorothy Wordsworths (sister and daughter to the great poet), especially, come to life with great zest. It is a shame in such an otherwise interesting and readable biography that Jones does not provide more of a social context for these people's actions; had she done so, this biography would have approached the quality of, say, Amanda Foreman's _Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire_. Nevertheless, for anyone interested in women's history or the Romantic movement in England, this book should be most appealing.

If you've ever wanted to know more about the women in the lives of some of England's greatest poets, then this is the book for you. Edith and Sarah Fricker were married to Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, along with William Wordsworth, wrote some of the best-loved poetry in the English language. However, this is not a book about the great men and their problems with the Muse. It's about the women in their lives, their wives, sisters and daughters, and how they coped with everyday life with poetry and genius as their everyday companions. The Lake poets were geniuses, and not always easy to live with. The women in their lives were often forced to live with incompatible people, run households on very little money, and cope with pregnancy, birth, death and illness. Often, the poet was too busy with his Muse to be of much practical help. The strength of Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth, Sarah Coleridge, their sisters and daughters was admirable under often difficult circumstances. "A passionate sisterhood" describes the other side of the Romantic ideal of the poet's genius. It shows us what it was like for the poet's family, and their struggles make for fascinating reading.