Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  After years of all living together, Mary and William clearly understood very well the strategies Dorothy had developed to cope with her position as third person in a marriage which was turning out to be exceptionally passionate. Sadly her method seems to have been to turn her face from any show of intimacy.

  In another letter, written from London, William told his beloved wife that all the amusements of the city appeared ‘worthless and insipid when I think of one sweet smile of thy face, [which] I absolutely pant to behold’. But this delightful expression of affection (so like the things William had once written to his sister – ‘ so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms’) had to be hidden because he had accidentally put it on a part of the letter which Dorothy would see. At first poor William tried desperately to cross out the passage but, he wrote, ‘I fear [it] will still be legible; at all events the very attempt to hide, will I fear give offense.’ In the end he was driven to subterfuge – ‘I have now blotted the sheet so that it is impossible to make out the obnoxious expressions.’44

  This extreme caution indicates the lengths to which husband and wife were used to going in order to protect Dorothy from any evidence of an exclusive love. But it also shows how strong were the defences which Dorothy had herself reared against the hurt of feeling left out. A natural, pleasant expression of love between husband and wife would be considered obnoxious by her.

  The girl who had been as spontaneous as Marianne Dashwood, determined to express her feelings and despise all that did not spring from an affectionate heart, had grown into a woman who must turn her back on intimacy and close her eyes to deep feeling. It seems to have become worse as the years progressed.

  When she was young Dorothy had taken an interest in weddings, but, as an older woman, she did not enjoy them. By the time baby Johnny came to marry in 1830, she could describe weddings as ‘but a melancholy pleasure.’ And she explained that ‘This wedding, however, was to be a gay one if a large assemblage of affectionately attached Relatives could make any wedding gay.’45

  Spinsters had ways of protecting themselves against jealousy. Both Dorothy and Jane commented freely on one of marriage’s downsides – over fecundity. ‘You will be glad to hear that she [Mary] is not with child again’, Dorothy wrote to her friend Catherine Clarkson in 1805, ‘– for her constitution is not strong enough to support the having a child every year.’46 Jane was, characteristically, more outspoken on the subject. ‘Poor Animal,’ she remarked on hearing that her niece Anna was pregnant again, ‘she will be worn out before she is thirty.’47

  As they aged both Dorothy and Jane preferred new brides to be discreet. In 1829 Dorothy grudgingly described one bridal pair as ‘the most pleasing company I ever had to do with at a time so engrossingly interesting to themselves.’48 And, after the marriage of her niece Anna in 1814, Jane commented: ‘Her letters have been very sensible & satisfactory, with no parade of happiness, which I liked them the better for. – I have often known young married Women write in a way I did not like, in that respect.’49

  What exactly was it about the letters and behaviour of brides that could be unpleasant? Perhaps it was just a general smugness about having achieved the status to which every woman was expected to aspire, or perhaps some of the young wives Jane and Dorothy knew contrived to imply something about the pleasures of sex, or hinted at being ‘in on’ a secret from which spinsters were excluded.

  As she aged, Dorothy’s revulsion at marital intimacy would exceed Jane’s, for it was not only in life, but in literature too that her tastes and attitudes changed. As a young girl she had eagerly devoured Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa with all its passionate scenes, but in 1815 she complained that, ‘When love begins almost all novels grow tiresome.’ And she said of Walter Scott’s novel Waverley ‘as usual the love is sickening.’50

  Spinster though she was – and more than a little given to cynicism – Jane Austen retained some of the feelings of her youth. She certainly never went so far as to think a bit of love spoiled a novel!

  There is one hint in Dorothy’s later letters – an oblique reference to her own past – which suggests her own experience may have caused her extreme coldness on this matter of love and marriage, a coldness which seems so far removed from the impulsive affections of her younger self.

  In 1829 Dorothy’s niece, Dora, acted as bridesmaid to a friend (Coleridge’s daughter), and she too set off to join the newlyweds on their honeymoon journey – just as Dorothy had, twenty-seven years earlier. However, Dora’s experience would not be quite the same as her aunt’s because another friend was also joining the party. Dorothy remarked on this difference with approval because, she said: ‘to be solitary in that capacity with a Honey-moon pair is not quite the most satisfactory thing in the world . . . ’51

  It is a hint of the hurt and defensiveness which William and Mary’s letters reveal. More than twenty years after she set out on that honeymoon journey from Yorkshire to Grasmere – a journey on which she seemed, by her own account, to be relaxed and perfectly at ease – Dorothy still remembered the experience as, ‘not quite the most satisfactory thing in the world.’

  Dorothy did not entirely abandon journal keeping when she left Dove Cottage. But the journals which she kept at her final home Rydal Mount (to which the family moved in 1813) are generally rather sketchy compared to those of her younger days. They only became detailed and animated when she went on a journey. As she remarked in her Scottish Recollections, ‘On going into a new country I seem to myself to waken up’.52

  It seems as if she needed to see new sights to arouse her talents. Even a short tour with William to Coniston and Furness, when she was fifty-three, was able to produce the same zeal and accuracy as that with which she first described the green paths down the hillsides making channels for streams in the opening lines of the Alfoxton Journal.

  ‘[E]ntrance arched –’ she wrote of a well at Lindale ‘rather lintelled over with old ash stem – roof arched with stone – green with moss – hung with Adder’s Tongue and Geraniums – ’53

  Her talent for observation did not diminish with age, but the plans to publish her travel writing came to nothing. Thomas De Quincey believed that this failure was little short of a tragedy in Dorothy’s life. He thought that her ‘excess of sensibility’ became a source of unhappiness to Dorothy in middle age. ‘I fear’, he wrote, ‘that Miss Wordsworth has suffered . . . from . . . an excess of pleasurable excitement and luxurious sensibility, sustained in youth by a constitutional glow from animal causes, but drooping as soon as that was withdrawn.’

  Publication of her work, he felt, might have sustained his friend and protected her from ‘the sort of suffering which, more or less, ever since the period of her too genial, too radiant youth, I suppose her to have struggled with.’ He believed that publication would have given Dorothy hopes for the future as she got older, for ‘It is too much to expect of any woman . . . that her mind should support itself in a pleasurable activity, under the drooping energies of life, by resting on the past or on the present.’54

  Dorothy never experienced the ‘pleasant cares and solicitudes’ of authorship which De Quincey believed would have supported her drooping spirits. But Jane’s final years were full of hope and excitement; sometimes she even defied the conventional distain for childless spinsters by unashamedly making children of her books. ‘As I wish very much to see your Jemima,’ she wrote to her niece Anna after the birth of her first baby, ‘I am sure you will like to see my Emma’.55

  Years ago, deciding that she would rein in her feelings, Jane had reserved for herself an inward life: a safe space where no-one could hurt her. Settled at Chawton she was free to follow what she had always known was the purpose of her existence, to write – and to write. Her tragedy was simply that she did not long enjoy the creative freedom she had won, dying too soon with, perhaps, many books left unwritten.

  Dorothy would li
ve all her life – until 25th January 1855 – with William, Mary and their family, working tirelessly for those she loved until illness overtook her. During her life only a few of her poems would be published among her brother’s work. There would be no volumes of travel-writing with her name on them, no translations from German or Italian, no novels which might have taught Walter Scott how Scottish characters ought to be portrayed.

  As William aged, his output of original work decreased, particularly after 1812 when financial pressures on the family brought about a major change. At that point – as William himself expressed it in a letter to the new Lord Lonsdale – he abandoned the hope that ‘the profits of my literary labours added to the little which I possessed would have answered to the rational wants of myself and my family.’ He asked his Lordship to find a job for him. Lord Lonsdale obliged and, in 1813, Wordsworth was appointed Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland – a tax-collecting role.56 After this change in lifestyle, Dorothy’s importance to her brother as a muse and assistant diminished, and the pressures of family life absorbed more of her attention.

  The end of her life was extremely sad. Though she lived to the age of 83, her last twenty years were spent in an upstairs room at the beautiful Rydal Mount, confused and unknowing, her mind completely broken. She became irritable, bad-tempered and irrational, given to making loud sudden noises and uttering obscenities at inappropriate moments, and she had such unreliable habits that her family shielded her from the outside world. De Quincey believed that she had, lacking any worthwhile activity to support her ‘drooping energies’, ‘yielded to that nervous depression which, I grieve to hear, has clouded her latter days.’ 57

  It is terrible to think that, in the end, Dorothy’s sensibility might have destroyed her sense. Her last illness is now generally believed to have been a form of dementia, compounded by physical weakness in her legs and bowels, and by long-term use of opium to relieve her symptoms. De Quincey – who had only the inaccurate (and, sometimes, positively bizarre) medical theories of the day to inform his judgement – may have been wrong in supposing that her condition was affected by the experiences of her life. It may have sprung entirely from physical causes.

  However, Barbara Crossley, in a talk given at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, has suggested that Dorothy’s illness was severe depression, not dementia. She draws attention to three characteristic symptoms of depression which were prominent in Dorothy’s case: low energy levels, an inability to experience enjoyment, and low mood. Also, she believes that the pattern of remission and relapse that can be traced in the letters written from Rydal Mount may be significant. For example, in 1850, when William was in his final illness, one friend wrote: ‘Miss Wordsworth was as much herself as ever she was in her life time and had absolute command of her own will, does not make noises, is not all self, thinks of the feelings of others, and is tenderly anxious about her brother.’ Dementia is generally an unremitting, progressive illness; such periods of lucidity would be unusual.58

  It may be that, as she aged, and William’s children grew up, Dorothy did feel that the family needed her less. All her life, she had held back nothing of herself. Her eagerness had made her give all to those she loved. She lacked an independent interest – such as writing for publication – an interest which could have given her a sense of purpose and achievement.

  But, in return for the sacrifices she had undoubtedly made in her life, she was deeply loved. Whatever her final illness was, William and Mary cared for her with uncomplaining affection.

  Jane lived the rest of her tragically short life at Chawton, dying on 18th July 1817 at the age of just 41, probably from Addison’s Disease (a failure of the adrenal gland).

  Though in the memory of her family she lived a typical spinster’s existence of reading, working for the poor, entertaining her nephews and nieces, and teaching local children to read, the reality was slightly different: there was some success, some recognition of her extraordinary talents in her lifetime. There was increasing praise from critics – including Walter Scott. News came to her of her novels being read in Ireland, in Cheltenham and in London, and by the time Emma, the last book to be published in her lifetime, appeared she had won the admiration of the Prince of Wales himself.

  However, Jane did not embrace the change in lifestyle which was now possible for her. An invitation to a literary soiree which offered the opportunity of meeting the famous Madame de Staël received a firm refusal. For years she had worked alone; now she drew back from conversing with other established writers, published anonymously and preserved that anonymity for as long as she could. She had always been reluctant to form intimate friendships. Perhaps the intimacy of shared ideas, which had attracted Dorothy Wordsworth ever since she was a girl, held no appeal for her.

  She seems to have preferred the creative world she had made for herself, living, to all appearances, the quiet life of a typical spinster, while – protected from intrusion by only a creaking door – she wrote three of the greatest novels in the English language.

  Jane and Dorothy were two unmarried, childless women who had failed to fulfil the destiny that their society prescribed for their sex. But they had neither drooped nor withered as Carlisle expected, nor developed the chagrin and peevishness which Dr Gregory believed inseparable from their condition. Instead they had forged their own meanings from their lives.

  Epilogue

  A Natural Sequel to an Unnatural Beginning?

  By the time Jane and Dorothy reached the end of their thirties, the world in which they lived had changed from that into which they had been born. The long wars against Napoleon had united English hearts against the French. The social changes connected with industrialisation and urbanisation were well underway, and the evangelical teaching which had disturbed Dorothy’s peace at Forncett had gained ground among the middle classes. There was a new air of religious seriousness throughout the country.

  There had been a subtle change too in the meaning of those opposites of Sense and Sensibility which Jane Austen had, nearly twenty years earlier, ascribed to the two heroines of her first mature novel. The sensibility of eighteenth century novels had been transformed into something more complex and thoughtful by the increasing influence of Wordsworth, Coleridge and other poets who had initiated, ‘a revolution in poetic form, diction and subject matter.’1 Dorothy Wordsworth had been a part of the discussions which began that revolution, and Jane Austen’s last great novels – particularly Mansfield Park and Persuasion – acknowledge that change. The moral complexity of their stories would not be possible without the new ideas.

  Jane and Dorothy had both been born into the insecurity of the pseudo-gentry class; they had shared in the inadequacies of an education which did little to prepare women for either poverty or independence. They had both grown up knowing that they were likely to be financially dependent on their brothers in a kind of informal arrangement which would allow them neither security nor dignity. And they had both lived with the contempt which their contemporaries heaped upon spinsters.

  They had met these challenges in different ways.

  Dorothy Wordsworth had followed her heart when she decided to throw in her lot with her brother. Her love and devotion had saved him and helped him become a great poet. She had achieved with him a true companionship such as few women of her time were able to form with a man. Her friendship with Coleridge had been exhilarating and she had been a part of one of the most exciting intellectual debates of her day. Her courage and belief in the ‘rightness’ of her own impulses had enabled her to disregard the materialistic standards of her class and live happily in comparative poverty.

  However, her open, loving nature bred a spirit of self-sacrifice, and the demands of the ‘Romantics’ among whom she lived were curiously similar to those of conservative writers like Hannah More who believed a woman’s highest achievement was to comfort, counsel and soothe the sorrows of a ‘man of sense’. Dorothy’s need to be loved tempted her to be the modest retiring f
emale that William admired and perhaps inhibited her from pursuing an independent livelihood. Important though she was in her brother’s work, her life with him did not inspire in her a confidence in her own abilities. By 1802, circumstances seem to have conspired to make it impossible for her to continue in the happy partnership which they had established at Dove Cottage. Restraint and silence were forced upon her as she encouraged William to marry, as she taught herself to live as the third party in his marriage.

  Jane Austen had given up Tom Lefroy and borne the pain in silence, as Elinor Dashwood bears the distress of losing Edward Ferrars. She had swallowed her resentment when she was torn from her home and work to live an empty life in Bath. But, when her compliance was put to the ultimate test in 1802, and she was forced to contemplate an intimate relationship with a man for whom she felt no attraction, she had found the inner strength to rebel. Her resolution held when, three years later, Edward Bridges’ proposal put her again in the position of deciding between feeling and prudence. She seems to have chosen the former with greater ease – even though her financial circumstances had deteriorated since her father’s death. Sometimes, Jane discovered, sense must give way to sensibility, if a woman is to retain her self-respect.

  The reserve which Jane cultivated was founded on the lessons she had learned as a child, and it was as much a protection as a sacrifice. Reading her preposterous early stories aloud to her family she had discovered how to say what she thought without being censored. She had learned too that her inner life was secure against the unfair demands of others around her. In her head, in her imagination, she found an exhilarating freedom, a freedom which produced those novels which have been enjoyed by generations of readers.

  This seems to have been a lesson Dorothy never learned, a kind of escape she never achieved. Eager and emotional, responsive to those around her, ever ready to love and accept new friends, it is as if she gave too much of herself away and never developed an inward space, or imaginative life, of her own. Her response to nature was intense, her descriptions exquisite, but imagination did not shape that response. Precision was the end of her endeavour and through it she seems to make a gift, to us her readers, of her experiences. She displays the same unselfconscious generosity of spirit to us as she did to those she loved.