A Passionate Sisterhood: Women of the Wordsworth Circle

The literary community known as the ""Wordsworth Circle"" is usually seen as centering on the extraordinary friendship between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poets who together launched the Romantic movement in England. Yet in this detailed, unflinching group study, Jones (Learning Not to Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti) shows that what truly kept this community together was less such masculine bonds than the sisterly solidarity among its women. Jones traces how, throughout the first half of the 19th century, the wives, sisters and daughters of Wordsworth and his poet friends supported one another's struggles with difficulties ranging from chronic toothache to the frequent loss of children--difficulties that Jones depicts without sentimentality. Among her subjects are the Fricker sisters, Sarah, Mary and Edith, well-educated scions of the Bristol merchant class who married, respectively, Coleridge, his friend Robert Lovell and the future poet laureate Robert Southey. There is also Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth's bride, and her entrancing sister Sarah, who joined the Wordsworth household. Then there is Dorothy Wordsworth--William's sister and muse, and, like Sarah Hutchinson, a sometime inamorata of Coleridge's. But Jones also attends closely to the fates of Dora Wordsworth, William's daughter, and Sarah Coleridge, daughter of Samuel. Although the two of them were the most brilliant of the poets' children, they also, in great measure due to their gender and consequent lack of opportunity, were among the most frustrated. Jones's research is accurate and her realism acute; many readers may wish, however, that she had dwelled a little less on the mundane details of 19th-century life, while offering more on the aesthetic and intellectual accomplishments of the women in the circle she so skillfully anatomizes. 12 pages b&w illus. (Apr.)