Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  Nineteen

  Exercised to Constraint

  On 3rd January 1801, Jane was able to tell her sister that she was becoming ‘more and more reconciled to the idea of our removal [to Bath]’1. The six surviving letters sent to Cassandra in the first two months of that year are determinedly cheerful.

  ‘We have lived long enough in this neighbourhood, the Basingstoke balls are certainly on the decline,’ Jane wrote, overlooking the possibility that it was not the balls themselves that were in decline, but rather her own enthusiasm for them. She was even able to find ‘something interesting in the bustle of going away’2, though the sight of the family possessions – including even her own piano and collection of music – being prepared for auction, must have been painful.

  The only truly sour note in these letters is her complaint about the way in which ‘everything . . . will be seized’ by James and his wife. And on 16th January, when the couple held a party to celebrate their wedding anniversary, she remarked grimly, ‘I was asked, but declined it.’3 She might have been reconciled to the move, but she could still not quite forgive the relations who, she believed, had forced it upon her.

  Where Jane, Cassandra and their parents were to settle in Bath was a matter for intense discussion, with Laura Place, Westgate Buildings and Queen’s Square all being canvassed at different times. But Jane had little hope of her own wishes being considered. She favoured Laura Place or its environs but did not ‘venture to expect it,’4 for her mother hankered after Queen’s Square. Yet Cassandra’s wishes carried some weight in the family. When Mrs Austen was keen to settle in Westgate Buildings (which, incidentally, was to become the rather insalubrious home of Mrs Smith in Persuasion) Jane assured her sister that ‘your opposition will be without difficulty decisive’5. Jane herself deferred to her sister. ‘My mother bargains for having no trouble at all in furnishing our house in Bath –’ she told Cassandra, ‘& I have engaged for your willingly undertaking to do it all’.6

  The plan was to stay with their Uncle and Aunt Leigh-Perrot in their house at Paragon and from there conduct the negotiations for renting their own home in Bath. But who was to move first and when? ‘Your going I consider as indispensably necessary,’ Jane wrote to Cassandra, ‘and I shall not like being left behind’.7 There is a hint here of Anne Elliot’s situation: the plot of Persuasion leaves her behind in the country when the family move because ‘nobody will want her in Bath’.8 Jane’s habit of stepping aside and allowing Cassandra to take the lead in practical matters was not changed by this disruption in their lives.

  In the end the move was arranged differently. Mrs Austen and both her daughters travelled to Martha Lloyd’s home at Ibthorpe at the beginning of May and, on the 4th, Jane and her mother went on alone to stay with the Leigh-Perrots, leaving Cassandra behind. Jane did not want to face the move alone without the support and companionship of her sister, but even that was finally forced upon her.

  These letters demonstrate the way in which a ‘daughter of the house’ was expected to behave: giving up her own desires in the interests of family harmony. Writers of all religious and political colours concurred on this. The conservative Reverend Mr Fordyce declared in his Sermons to Young Women, ‘Providence designed women for a state of dependence, and consequently of submission.’ Priscilla Wakefield warned that, should a woman’s ‘destination be to remain an inhabitant in her father’s house, cheerfulness, good temper, and obliging resignation of her will to that of others, will be there equally her duty, and her interest’.9 Even the radical thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau was in agreement. ‘[Girls] must be thwarted from an early age . . . ’ he wrote in Emile. ‘They must be exercised to constraint, so that it costs them nothing to stifle all their fantasies to submit them to the will of others.’

  Jane did a fair amount of stifling of her fantasies as the Bath scheme was carried into action; she had no choice. As she said to Cassandra, ‘I have given up the desire of your going to Bath with my mother and me. There is nothing which energy will not bring one to.’10

  However, Rousseau – illustrious philosopher though he was – was wrong in supposing that anyone could do all that stifling without any personal cost. The cost to Jane was to include eight miserable, barren years during which she wrote hardly anything.

  In her new home at Dove Cottage, Dorothy Wordsworth was able to write her best work. Her feelings do not appear to be stifled, for they are fearlessly acknowledged from the very beginning of the journal she kept during her early years in Grasmere.

  It opens on 14th May 1800. Her younger brother John – now a sailor in merchant ships – had been staying at Dove Cottage and on this day he and William set off to visit the Hutchinson family in Yorkshire. Her first entry has an air of loss and melancholy.

  ‘I left them at the turning of the Low-wood bay under the trees. My heart was so full that I could hardly speak to W. when I gave him a farewell kiss. I sate a long time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, and after a flood of tears my heart was easier. The lake looked to me I knew not why dull and melancholy, and the weltering on the shores seemed a heavy sound.’

  After six months in her new home it hurt her to part with both her brothers, but it was William who was uppermost in her mind; her farewell kiss to him was remembered. In the same entry, she explained that she was starting this journal, ‘because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give Wm pleasure by it when he comes home again.’ It was a way of staying connected to the man she loved by writing down the little observations which, had he been present, might have been spoken aloud.

  In the Grasmere Journal (which was continued long after William returned from this trip in early June), though she does not use the self-conscious device of addressing her journal as an animate friend, Dorothy seems to write as she did to Jane Pollard back in Penrith days, putting down whatever is ‘uppermost in my mind’. The result is an eclectic mixture of impressions and concerns, ranging from their many and varied visitors (‘Mr Simpson came to tea . . . We drank tea in the orchard.’11) and anxiety about Coleridge and his disintegrating marriage (‘We sat a long time under the Wall of a sheep-fold’, runs one account of his visits. ‘Had some interesting melancholy talk about his private affairs.’12), to moonlight on the lake (like ‘herrings in the water’13) to cookery (‘a bad giblet pie’ on one occasion14) and the illnesses from which both Dorothy and William constantly suffered. ‘Birds sang divinely today. Bowels and head bad’, runs one line.15

  The Grasmere Journal displays the sensibility of Marianne Dashwood, but also, sometimes, the down-to-earth sense of her elder sister. ‘The snow-covered mountains were spotted with rich sunlight, a palish buffish colour. The roads were very dirty . . . ’ she wrote on 14th February 1802.

  ‘How can you think of dirt, with such objects before you?’ Marianne might have demanded (as she demands of Edward Ferrars when he notices mud in a beautiful scene). But Dorothy could be practical. And now she could be reserved too, a failing Marianne condemns in both Edward and her sister, Elinor. The outpouring of feeling in the journal, though it can create an illusion of closeness to the writer, is oddly impersonal, and, in the end, Dorothy eludes us. Though she may have written what she felt, she failed to record why she felt it. In fact the only thing which is always unequivocal is the strength of the emotion.

  The opening passage, which seems to be a spontaneous expression of feeling, in fact reveals very little. ‘[M]y heart was so full’, she wrote. But full of what? Was she simply distressed at the parting? Or was she upset because William was visiting Mary Hutchinson – the woman he would marry two years later? Was the possibility of marriage already in the air on this May morning, giving to the present separation the threat of future division? Was it the unacceptable emotion of jealousy which put Dorothy in danger of arguing with herself? Or was she match-making? Had she herself persuaded William into this visit? And was she now wondering whether she had done the right thing?

  By the time the
Grasmere Journal opens, something seems to have happened to the young woman who had been so very open about her feelings, something which made her cautious in her expression of emotion.

  It is not unreasonable to suspect Dorothy’s apparently transparent prose of hiding secrets, for we know that there is one very important secret concealed in the journal. During 1802, when the short suspension of war made communication possible between England and France, letters from William’s abandoned mistress, Annette, were received and answered at Dove Cottage. The worry of these letters frequently affected Dorothy’s health. On 15th February, for example, a letter arrived from Annette, and Dorothy ‘slept badly’ that night; on 26th March ‘William wrote to Annette’ and Dorothy ‘was ill and in bad spirits’; on 3rd July another letter came from France and the next day Dorothy was ‘sick and ill had been made sleepless by letters.’

  She wrote nothing in her journal about the letters’ content; she did not mention who Annette was, nor why the letters upset her. It was not from the Grasmere Journal – published in 1897 – that the story of William’s French love affair was first pieced together by researchers; the Annette from whom these disturbing letters came was not identified until 1913.16

  Free and unconventional though Dorothy’s Grasmere life appears to be by her own account, restraint and silence were being forced upon her. Now that Annette’s story is known, we can trace something of that pattern she described herself in which ‘any thing that exercised my thoughts or feelings’ brought on illness.There are, however, other illnesses, sleepless nights and fits of anxiety in the journal which do not correspond with the arrival of Annette’s letters.

  The Grasmere Journal is many things. It is a compelling account of life in Dove Cottage: an imperfect idyll, punctuated by hard work and illness and inadequately explained bouts of extreme sadness.

  Sometimes it was a reference work to which William might turn for ideas. ‘He asks me to set down the story of Barbara Wilkinson’s Turtle Dove,’ Dorothy wrote in January 1800 and then related a story they had probably heard from a neighbour.17 Scenes and characters from the journal frequently reappear in William’s work. For example, ‘a very tall woman, tall much beyond the measure of tall women,’ who appears in the journal begging at Dove Cottage takes on a romantic air in William’s poem Beggars, where,

  ‘She towered, fit person for a Queen

  To lead those ancient Amazonian files;’

  And the woman’s ‘very long brown cloak’ which the journal describes is transmuted by poetry to:

  ‘A mantle to her very feet

  Descending with a graceful flow,’

  The description might have been embellished by William’s imagination, but the story of the woman and her two little boys (‘wild figures’ in prose, ‘joyous vagrants’ in poetry) is essentially the same in journal and poem.18

  The style of the journal was a development of that employed at Alfoxton. There are those absolutely accurate descriptions of her surroundings: ‘The valley of its winter yellow, but the bed of the brook still in some places almost shaded with leaves – the oaks brown in general but one that might be almost called green.’19

  Sometimes now this precision was combined with a gathering together of vivid, disparate impressions which combine in the reader’s mind to create something more than a picture – a keen awareness perhaps – of the scene she experienced:

  ‘The moon shone upon the water below Silver-how, and above it hung, combining with Silver how on one side, a Bowl-shaped moon the curve downwards – the white fields, glittering Roof of Thomas Ashburner’s house, the dark yew tree, the white fields – gay and beautiful.’20

  And the manuscripts of the Journal reveal that, unselfconscious though Dorothy’s style seems to be, she was, as she wrote, searching for the best form of expression. For example, on 17th March 1802 she described her home valley as ‘quiet and fair in the moonlight’, but that phrase has been changed to ‘fair and quiet in the moonshine’.21

  The journal also testifies to Dorothy’s involvement in William’s work. Tracing the tortuous progress of one particular poem, The Pedlar, gives an idea of how she contributed, though it still leaves some uncertainty as to whether she would be best described as muse, emotional support, secretary or co-author.

  By 2nd February 1802 The Pedlar had begun to give William trouble; he ‘wished to break off composition, and was unable, and so did himself harm.’ Dorothy comforted him by reading aloud from Paradise Lost. He took a day off the next day and, on the 4th simply ‘thought a little about the Pedlar’. On the 5th he ‘[s]ate up late at the pedlar’, and slept badly that night.

  On the 6th Dorothy probably made a fair copy of the poem for him, for on the following day there was a version to be read through. Dorothy thought (probably hoped) that it was now finished – ‘but lo . . . it was uninteresting and must be altered. Poor William.’

  Poor Dorothy too! For she now faced not only more copying, but more anxiety over William’s health which was always badly affected by composition.

  On the 9th William ‘fell to work, and made himself unwell.’ But he must have been making progress, for on the following day Dorothy was ‘writing out the Poem as we hope for a final writing’. Later the same day they ‘read the first part of the poem and were delighted with it . . . ’ Dorothy must have been relieved! But not for long, for she continued, rather obscurely, ‘ . . . but William afterwards got to some ugly places and went to bed tired out.’

  Next day he made himself so tired by working on the poem that he had to lie down on a mattress in the sitting room while Dorothy read to him again. He woke refreshed . . .  ‘but he got to work again and went to bed unwell.’ On the 12th: ‘I almost finished writing The Pedlar, but poor William wore himself and me out with labour.’ It was the first – and only – time she mentioned feeling weary with the enterprise herself.

  On the 14th: ‘William left me at work altering some passages of the Pedlar, and went into the orchard.’ He then went away for a couple of days, so Dorothy had a break from copying, worrying and recopying. But when he came home on the 16th, ‘He . . . had altered the pedlar.’ (Oh dear more copying!) He continued to work on the poem and make himself ill until the 28th when the journal produces one of its most enigmatic comments. ‘Disaster pedlar’ wrote Dorothy – probably too physically and emotionally exhausted to explain herself further.

  Maybe William had detected a flaw in the composition, or maybe all the changes had made his draft illegible. Whatever it was, Dorothy would now have faced a dilemma. Should she encourage him to finish the poem – and so make himself ill? Her love for the man was in conflict with her love for the poet. Nothing happened for two days; but then, on 3rd March: ‘I was so unlucky as to propose to rewrite The Pedlar. Wm got to work and was worn to death.’

  William was off on another journey the next day, but he must have left a new version of the poem because, while he was away, Dorothy ‘wrote the Pedlar, and finished it . . . ’22 But there is one, slightly ambiguous, comment the next day: ‘I stitched up the Pedlar’.

  Since she had finished copying the poem the previous day it seems likely that this was a literal stitching – attaching the sheets of paper to one another. But it is possible that her needlework was metaphoric, involving a putting together of disparate verses to make a coherent whole. Whichever it was, there was only one more reading – and a little more altering – of this troublesome poem, before William began to talk of publishing it on 10th March, which must have been a considerable relief to Dorothy.23

  This saga of anguish and labour shows that a simple country life dedicated to poetry could be extremely stressful, and contrasts sharply with serene journal entries such as, ‘ . . . sailed down to Loughrigg. Read poems on the water, and let the boat take its own course.’24 The illness (usually manifesting as a pain in his side), which Wordsworth suffered whenever he wrote, was probably psychosomatic, but it would have been no less debilitating for that –
and no less distressing to witness.

  The exact role which Dorothy played in the composition of William’s poems is difficult to establish; though it would seem that, observing them, local folk had their own views on the subject. ‘Well,’ recalled one neighbour, ‘fwoaks said she was cleverest mon of the two at his job, and he allays went to her when he was puzzelt.’ Another provided this memorable image of the two Wordsworths working together: ‘Mr Wordsworth went bumming and booming about, and she, Miss Dorothy, kept close behint him, and she picked up the bits as he let ‘em fall, and tak’em down, and put ‘em on paper for him.’25

  What is certain is that Dorothy’s emotional investment in William’s work was immense; and she identified so closely with him that frequently she dropped names and pronouns altogether, writing, for example, on 1st August 1800, ‘Altered the Whirlblast etc.’ It is not always possible to know what was done by her and what was done by William.

  The relationship between brother and sister was an extraordinary one. It had sustained Dorothy for many years, it had made her exquisitely happy, it had energised her, and it had given her the courage to rebel against the restrictions of life with her family. But it seems that, during the years at Grasmere, it began to impose on her its own, terrible restraint.

  Twenty

  Our Affections do Rebel

  About this time, in the poem Home at Grasmere, William Wordsworth captured the completeness and finality of his and Dorothy’s union. Once more using her poetic name ‘Emma’, he wrote:

  ‘Long is it since we met to part no more,