Chapter Two—
Wordsworth and the Poetic Vocation:
A Man Speaking to Men

But it is not necessary to invent a literary tradition for women, only to rewrite the records and to put in what men  have left out.
Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel, 1986

When Wordsworth wrote the fragmentary passages that would form the two-part Prelude in 1798–99, he was not thinking specifically in terms of audience or publication. Rather, as he says in his letter, he wrote in the isolation of the German winter "in self-defence."^[1] In thinking back to the striking events of childhood and youth, Wordsworth embraced both the sublime and the beautiful, both the terrifying and the nurturing capacity of the natural world. Especially in the second part, Wordsworth evokes the beautiful, associated with the feminine, and describes its influence on his life.

But by the time he composed the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth was considering his relationship with his audience. Now Wordsworth presents himself as a poet with a vocation; he specifically stakes his claim to being a serious male poet who sees himself in the company of poets from Catullus to Pope (PrW 1:122). In the Preface Wordsworth reiterates his claim to this male vocation at the same time that he defends writing about abandoned women and mad mothers and focuses his poetics on emotion. Furthermore, Wordsworth's dependency on women as responsive readers of his work grew even stronger in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But in the Preface Wordsworth makes no direct connection between his writing, in which women figure prominently as subjects, and women readers or writers.

There is also an interesting discrepancy between Wordsworth's public pose in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, his aim of reforming the reading

public of the nation, and the way that so many poems in the volume construct a more intimate and reassuring audience: the "dear Sister" in "Tintern Abbey," the "few natural hearts" of "Michael." Several recent commentators, such as Jon Klancher, have seen a shift in Wordsworth (by the time of the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" of 1815) toward a much more ideal conception of his reader and from a model of an audience based on "consumption" to a model based on "reception."^[2] In both the "Essay, Supplementary" and in letters of the period Wordsworth draws a distinction between the reading "Public" and the "People" who one day will appreciate his poetry.^[3] But in the rhetoric of the Preface Wordsworth focuses on the corrupt taste of the public readership: he still hopes to wake them from their torpor, and in his emphasis on taste he presumes that his poetry is written for consumption (even though he protests against any analogy between a taste for poetry and a taste for sherry). In the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth paradoxically wants to reach his audience by replicating the intimacy of a private reading, imagining his audience in place.

Furthermore, contrary to Klancher's argument that Wordsworth moves from a concern with "consumption" to a preoccupation with "reception," I believe that Wordsworth never fully abandons the consumption model and, in fact, he rephrases it in the late 1820s and 1830s. Klancher assumes a Wordsworthian decline after 1815 and stops there; he reads the "Essay, Supplementary" as if it were Wordsworth's last word on readers and poetic tradition. But for thirty-five more years, as his correspondence reveals, Wordsworth was intensely involved in new editions of his poetry, in revising poems for publication, and in the debate over the laws of copyright. He thought and wrote constantly about how his poetry was presented to the public and who was reading it. In fact, he thought even more intensely about himself as a publishing poet because he was a poet in an age of popular novel-reading, an activity he steadfastly disparaged.

In an essay that precedes the more recent historicist arguments (and that Klancher particularly critiques), Morris Eaves theorizes that in one phase of an expressive theory the artist not only expresses the work of art but also expresses and personalizes his audience.^[4] The Romantic expressive artist, in Eaves's formulation, reaches out to his audience in a gesture of love and intimacy and requires the same commitment from his readers: "The assumption is that acts of imagination, to be complete, must be mutual; and the conditions for them are the same as for any profound human relationship, the forgiveness and love that assure mutual

commitment and engagement, because complete human relationships are also imaginative acts" (793). For Blake the ultimate model for the relationship between artist and audience is that of Jesus to his disciples (794–95); for both Wordsworth and Blake, Eaves claims, the basis of the mutual love relationship between artist and audience is equality: "An art that assumes a worthy audience of equals is the only authentically democratic art" (797).

Both Eaves's elegant argument and Klancher's critique of its Romantic idealism omit the category of gender. But, as I shall argue, gender anxiety was at the heart of Wordsworth's formulations in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth imagined as gendered the marketplace he must enter, the literary tradition to which he aspired, and the role of the poet he wished to fill. As we shall see, from this point of view a love based on the prophet/disciple model—no matter how great the intimacy or what theological sanction it has—presumes inequality: Wordsworth never imagines his "man speaking to men" to be in fact a woman.

If in 1800 Wordsworth imagines that he is above the frantic and fickle marketplace and the tastes of uncultivated readers, and in the "Essay, Supplementary" (1815) he seems to give up on the reading public altogether, by around 1830 he redefines his relationship to his contemporary audience. Although Wordsworth always complained about how little money he made from his publications—not enough to buy his shoestrings, according to one story—he did achieve popularity in the 1830s. And when he perceived of himself as a known and popular poet, he wanted to enter the marketplace on his own terms: in carefully planned editions of poems. His involvement with gift annuals, as we shall see in chapter 5, gave him great anxiety because they were financially tempting but robbed him of at least some control over the production and distribution of his own work. He resented not so much entering the market as entering the market on someone else's terms and in the mixed, feminized company of the anthologies that were finding their way into middle-class drawing rooms and into literary hearts across England.

The Common Inheritance of Poets

In the first years of the nineteenth century, however, Wordsworth inhabited a different literary world. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he couches the bond between the poet and tradition in terms that are familial but that exclude women from the genealogy:

I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject, consequently I hope it will be found that there is in these Poems little falsehood of description, and that my ideas are expressed in language fitted to their respective importance. Something I must have gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of all good poetry, namely good sense; but it has necessarily cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets.

(PrW 1:132, my emphasis)^[5]

Wordsworth wants to preserve the ideal of inheritance from father to son, but he also wants to change the terms of that inheritance. What should be passed on from father to son, he implies, are not phrases and figures of speech (which can be reproduced by any imitator) but a universal, permanent and philosophical language (1:124) that goes back to the King James Bible and beyond, to the origins of the modern English language.^[6] This is the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton—the language of the poetic as well as the biblical patriarchs. This is not the language of "sickly and stupid German Tragedies" or that of "frantic novels" (PrW 1:128), that is, of popular gothic fiction such as that of Ann Radcliffe. Wordsworth contrasts the philosophical language to which he aspires with the artificial language of writers who "separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish foods for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation" (1:124).

Wordsworth's rhetoric in the Preface privileges the stable and the permanent over the fickle and the fashionable. It would have been usual at the time to link such terms as universal and permanent, on the one hand, and such qualities as capriciousness, fickleness, fashion, and appetite, on the other hand, with gender categories. The universal is masculine, of course, and everything uncertain or fickle is feminine. Mary Wollstonecraft, for instance, speaks in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) of the "frippery of dress" (75), "the varnish of fashion" (99), and "luxury and appetite" (137) as the vices to which women are most subject.^[7] Wordsworth claims universal terms as a "man speaking to men"—and he really does speak as a man and a male poet who sees himself as an inheritor of a tradition of male poets. And for all the apparent modesty in the "man speaking to men" euphemism, Wordsworth goes on to claim that the poet is greater than ordinary mortals:

a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man

pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.

(PW 1:138, 1850)

The poet Wordsworth describes here is not just the author of the Lyrical Ballads; this is also the poet whom Coleridge has urged to write the great philosophical poem of the age, The Recluse. His "comprehensive soul" distinguishes him not only from other "men" but also, by inference, from inferior poets and authors of "frantic novels."

Whereas in his life and poetry Wordsworth may cultivate the feminine, in the Preface his gendered rhetoric associates the feminine with contemptible qualities in both authors, with their false refinements, and in the reading public, with its degenerate taste. Although Wordsworth does not name them, he implicitly denigrates popular women writers as well as any readers who respond to them:

For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespear and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.

(PrW 1:128)

The political importance of this passage has been noted in recent years, but its gendered rhetoric deserves equal attention. In Wordsworth's analysis of the corrupt state of society, the increasingly urban, industrial, and commercial world is driven by cravings and desire for instant gratification. According to this view, society is corrupted by what it thinks of as progress, and literature by the same craving, the public's desire to be entertained and teased by gothic plots (often fashioned by women writers) when they could be reading Shakespeare—or Wordsworth. In contrast to the extravagance of these writers, Wordsworth argues for the elegant simplicity of the Lyrical Ballads. And in contrast to the instant gratification of appetite, Wordsworth wants readers to cultivate a taste

for literature, "for an accurate taste in Poetry and in all the other arts, as Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed, is an acquired talent, which can only be produced by thought and long continued intercourse with the best models of composition" (PrW 1:156). This intercourse, according to neoclassical standards, should be governed by a sense of propriety. The extended sexual metaphor suggests that legitimate forms of intercourse are sanctioned by custom and thought, not debased by instant gratification of desire. The admirable writer, in Wordsworth's terms, does not prostitute himself to gratify the reader, nor does he want to tease the reader. Wordsworth instead subscribes to an ideal, universal view of the male artist working in a male tradition: an exclusive, patriarchal, but non-Freudian (non-Bloomian) model of literary relationship.^[8]

Wordsworth's view of contemporary society and the reading public sounds remarkably like another writer's critique:

These are the women who are amused by the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retailed in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties. I do not mention the understanding, because never having been exercised, its slumbering energies rest inactive, like the lurking particles of fire which are supposed universally to pervade matter.^[9]

(183)

Mary Wollstonecraft's rhetoric in the Vindication of 1792 echoes through the Preface of eight years later: "stupid novelists"/"stupid German Tragedies" and "frantic novels," "slumbering energies"/"savage torpor," "meretricious scenes"/"deluges of idle and extravagant stories," and so on. A strange alliance, perhaps, but both writers distrust the trends in literature and the manners that such trends follow. Wollstonecraft wants to wake middle-class women's energies from their moral and imaginative slumber; Wordsworth wants to awaken a feminized reading public to the powerful simplicity of his own poetry.

Wordsworth disparages the gothic tradition as a low and feminized form that caters to the base instincts of the reading public. Gothic fiction seems almost below comment in Wordsworth's immediate circle, but their dislike extends to the novel in general. The Wordsworths maintained (judging from correspondence) a lifelong dislike of the novel as a genre. Typical comments from Dorothy Wordsworth include the letter she wrote to William on 23 April 1812: "We have not been sufficiently settled to read anything but Novels. Adeline Mowbray [1804, by Mrs.

Opie] made us quite sick before we got to the end of it" (MY 2:7). Nor did William ever show much interest in novels, to say the least. He had some eighteenth-century favorites and had some respect for Scott as a novelist, but he remained ambivalent about the genre. Wordsworth was even reported to have said of Dickens: "a very talkative, vulgar young person—but I dare say he may be clever…. I have never read a line he has written."^[10] Whether this quote is accurate or not, Wordsworth's omission of the novel from his serious discourse on literary traditions supports this position.

Bradford Mudge has recently argued that Wordsworth's disparagement of the gothic in particular and the novel in general can be seen in the context of male anxiety about the popularity of novels, the explosion of women as readers, and the threat of women writers.^[11] Mudge's argument links this anxiety about the gothic with the hysteria over prostitution that arose in the middle of the nineteenth century, a response to the threat of disruptive female sexuality. Wordsworth, as we have seen, anticipates this midcentury discourse by connecting "frantic novels" with illicit sex and by implying that some women authors—never named—are engaging in literary prostitution.^[12]

One of the great paradoxes of Wordsworth's stance against popular gothic fiction is that he seems to be drawing the line between high (masculine) and low (feminine) culture, but the core of the Preface and of his program for poetry explodes hierarchies, lifting and ennobling the simple, the lowly, and the rustic. Wordsworth accomplishes this through experimentation with a popular form, the ballad. But in the Preface Wordsworth frames his argument by emptying the ballad of its folk heritage and lifting it up to the level of a literary genre. In this inventive approach to the origins of ballads, Wordsworth in effect erases a part of women's literary tradition. As Virginia Woolf muses in A Room of One's Own: "I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter's night."^[13] We can imagine many of the women in the Lyrical Ballads spinning and crooning, but in Wordsworth's invention of literary history women are neither authors nor transmitters of folk culture.

As a male poet, too, Wordsworth can emphasize the importance of "pleasure" without fear of criticism, for pleasure had been sanctioned by theorists from Aristotle to Burke:

Nor let the necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the Poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere, because not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure.

(1:140, 1850)

So, at the same time that he condemns the fickle taste of the reading public, Wordsworth builds his poetics on the idea that the true pleasures of poetry are akin to those of legitimate and well-regulated sexual passion. He argues that "the direction of our sexual appetite, and all the passions connected with it" derive from "the perception of similitude in dissimilitude" (148). With the authority of a male tradition, Wordsworth claims that the poet is "a man pleased with his own passions and volitions" (138) as he imparts pleasure to the reader.^[14] Wordsworth idealizes pleasure as the "spirit of love" and the "naked dignity of man," a sanctioned response to the reading experience when there is the proper (marriage) contract between author and reader.

Although Wordsworth and other male writers may be nervous about female passions, Wordsworth is certainly not shy about constructing his poetics on an extended sexual analogy. In fact, he explicitly describes meter as both adding a charm to poetry and tempering the power of poetic passion so that it does not exceed proper bounds. The metrical form of poetry is thus for Wordsworth the perfect medium both for expressing the overflowing passions and for keeping those passions in check, presumably so that his poetry never sinks to the level of mere gratification of appetite. Meter, "the exponent or symbol held forth … in different areas of literature" (1:122), is basic both to the poet's relationship to poets of the past—from Catullus to Pope—and to his contemporary audience.

Marlon Ross has argued that Wordsworth and other Romantic poets "subliminally" identify with two related nineteenth-century masculine roles: those of "the scientist and the industrial capitalist."^[15] Ross offers many insights into the gendered Romantic imagination, but in this case, I think, he misrepresents Wordsworth's attitudes. Wordsworth has much more uncertainty—both subliminal and spoken—about the role model of the poet as masculine conqueror than Ross acknowledges. Rather than a masculine empire, Wordsworth sees the industrial and commercial world as feminized (fickle and transitory), opposed to the

enduring forms of nature that fill the mind of the poet who has "thought long and deeply." Wordsworth has to maintain himself in the face of what he sees as the industrial and commercial degradation of nature and the arts; he seeks, not conquest, but renewal.

J. G. A. Pocock argues that the view of economic man as a conquering hero is a nineteenth-century fantasy, very different from the eighteenth-century conception:

His eighteenth-century predecessor was seen as on the whole a feminized, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with the interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites, and symbolised by such archetypically female goddesses of disorder as Fortune, Luxury, and most recently Credit herself…. Therefore, in the eighteenth-century debate over the new relations of polity to economy, production and exchange are regularly equated with the ascendancy of the passions and the female principle.^[16]

Pocock's insight helps to clarify Wordsworth's position, which is in this case more in tune with the eighteenth century. Wordsworth's anxieties about the contemporary world in the 1800 Preface lead him to disassociate himself from "effeminate" displays of appetite, sensation, and over-refinement in culture and society. Wordsworth feminizes the fickle audience—and the marketplace he must enter. In the place of capriciousness and corruption, Wordsworth urges his readers to cultivate a taste based on a particular tradition; hence the allusion to classical writers and to Sir Joshua Reynolds's standard of a taste that must be acquired through the contemplation of excellent models.

Without considering gender, David Simpson has argued that Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction, appended to the 1802 Preface, is also an economic and political statement.^[17] According to Simpson, Wordsworth sees excesses of literary refinement as "literary manifestations of negative changes in the condition of England" (63). By extension, both the poetic diction of the neoclassical period and the literary excesses of the contemporary gothic are associated with corruptions on two extremes of the spectrum: with over-refinement, on the one hand, and with appetite, on the other. In eighteenth-century discourse, both of these are associated with the feminine, with the inability to find a middle ground between the two extremes.

Paradoxically, Wordsworth's own language implicates both poetic diction and the gothic, both high and low, in the same corruption of language and taste:

In process of time metre became a symbol or promise of this unusual language, and whoever took upon him to write in metre, according as he possessed more or less of true poetic genius, introduced less or more of this adulterated phraseology into his compositions, and the true and the false were inseparably interwoven until, the taste of men becoming gradually perverted, this language was received as a natural language: and at length, by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain degree really become so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one nation to another, and with the progress of refinement this diction became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain humanities of nature by a motely masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas.

(Appendix, PrW 1:161–62)

This is an extraordinary passage, in which Wordsworth uses the charged language of adulteration, perversion, and corruption to condemn poetic diction. Furthermore, the image of the "motely masquerade of tricks" suggests both illicit pleasures and a carnivalesque inversion of appropriate relationships, with the degraded masquerades usurping the "naked dignity of man."

Perhaps Wordsworth expended so much rhetorical energy in the Preface disassociating himself from the feminine in art and culture because he knew that his subject matter (forsaken women, mad mothers, and other marginalized figures) and his reverence for emotion would in fact associate him with women and with women writers. Like the other male Romantics, Wordsworth feared the charge of feminization as leveled by contemporary critics. In his infamous review of the 1807 poems, which also includes comments on the Lyrical Ballads, Francis Jeffrey implies that Wordsworth has feminized poetry with his "namby-pamby," his "prettyisms," his "babyish" verse. Jeffrey's attack on Wordsworth's lack of decorum reveals gendered standards. Although Jeffrey implies that serious male poets do not write poems on daisies or daffodils, he approves of a few poems (such as "The Character of the Happy Warrior") as being "manly."^[18] In none of Jeffrey's reviews is Wordsworth the conquering hero; he comes across more as the fool who wastes his talents on unworthy, womanish subject matter. Nor, it might be added, does the liberal Jeffrey object to Wordsworth's defense of the lower classes per se: his critique is motivated by anxiety about gender, not class. In fact, Jeffrey and Wordsworth share a deep anxiety about gender, an anxiety that lies at the heart of both Jeffrey's rejection of low (hence, feminized) subjects and Wordsworth's distrust of the novel. They just do not agree on what is unworthy.

Shakespeare's Scottish Sister

Despite Wordsworth's implicit denial of his connection with women writers, the Preface belongs in the context of the rise of women poets in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because scholars have only recently begun to rediscover the women writers of this period, Wordsworth's Preface has been read in isolation from this tradition. The first issue of the Women Writers Project Newsletter, however, includes the astounding claim that over five hundred women published at least one volume of verse between 1770 and 1830.^[19] Wordsworth, writing his Preface smack in the middle of this period, was, of course, aware of many of these writers and, as Stuart Curran has argued, was influenced by them.^[20] But Wordsworth defines himself against them, instead claiming kinship with a male tradition, that is, with Catullus and Pope, Milton and Shakespeare, rather than Charlotte Smith or Joanna Baillie. He does not even mention women writers in the Preface, because he does not want to be placed in their company. Indeed, one could—and many of us have—read the Preface as if there were no women writers to be considered. As Marlon Ross suggests, patriarchal tradition viewed women as dabblers in verse, not as poets with careers to found and maintain.^[21] But the absence of women in the Preface is remarkable for the poet whose first poem, published in 1787, was entitled "Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress."

As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Virginia Woolf's story of Shakespeare's sister from A Room of One's Own has to be revised. The question is no longer, Why were there no female Shakespeares? but, rather, Why and how were Shakespeare's sisters excluded from the canon? In Wordsworth's case, patronizing attitudes toward the careers of women writers and the refusal to take women writers seriously when discussing the "common inheritance of Poets" perhaps begin to explain the absence of women from the Preface. Wordsworth, I think, particularly felt the need to distance himself from popular contemporary women writers, who were, after all, his competitors. He deliberately constructs a view of literary history without women, mentioning gothic novelists only to dismiss them. By his silence he completely omits poets such as Charlotte Smith, whose Elegiac Sonnets (1784) was among the many well-known volumes by women. In fact, Wordsworth not only read Elegiac Sonnets at Cambridge, but he also called on Smith in Brighton in November 1791 on his way to France. As Mary Moorman explains, Smith not only received Wordsworth warmly, but she also "gave him a

letter of introduction to Miss Helen Maria Williams, who had been living in Orleans, the very city in France to which he was now making his way" (Moorman 1:170). Despite this interest in both writers, neither finds her way into the Preface.

By 1815, in the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface," Wordsworth could safely praise the natural imagery of Anne Finch's poetry in the context of denigrating other eighteenth-century writers.^[22] But in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, only male writers may be heirs to the tradition. One of the many ironies of Wordsworth's position in the Preface is that in his later years he began to advocate the inclusion of women poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in various anthologies of British verse. In a letter dated 12 January 1829 to Dionysius Lardner, for instance, Wordsworth complains that "neither Dr Johnson, nor Dr Anderson, nor Chalmers, nor the Editor I believe of any other Corpus of English Poetry takes the least notice of female Writers—this, to say nothing harsher, is very ungallant. The best way of giving comprehensive interest to the subject would be to begin with Sappho and proceed downwards through Italy antient and Modern, Spain, Germany, France, and England" (LY 2:4). On 16 October of the same year he writes to the editor Alexander Dyce concerning Dyce's Specimens of the British Poetesses, congratulating him on the publication but asking to be consulted if there is to be a second edition, specifically so that he can include the poems of Anne Finch (LY 2:157). Granted, in 1829 Wordsworth sees his mission as a kind of gallantry, but he is nonetheless quite familiar with female poets and he has a sense of a female tradition that begins with Sappho. Perhaps Wordsworth was more generous and less defensive in his correspondence because there he was not considering his own reputation and readership—or perhaps he was feeling secure enough in 1829 to be generous.

In the Preface, however, the popularity of women writers is an unacknowledged influence on (and subtext of) Wordsworth's attempt to define his career. One work in particular, Scottish writer Joanna Baillie's "Introductory Discourse" to A Series of Plays, in Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, only recently even linked to Wordsworth, may be an important pre-text for Wordsworth's Preface.^[23] Baillie's "Discourse" was first published in 1798, with the first volume of her plays. As Stuart Curran and Marlon Ross indicate in separate articles, this anonymous publication made a much greater impression on the reading public of London and Edinburgh than another anonymous publication of 1798, the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads,

and had a lasting influence on the theory of Romantic drama.^[24] Baillie's until recently neglected "Discourse" may be seen as a precursor to Wordsworth's analysis of the literary and cultural environment of 1800, thus linking Wordsworth's theory closely to that of one of his female contemporaries.

But although Baillie's preface resembles Wordsworth's, her anonymity and her tone reveal crucial differences in how she views her role. Wordsworth claims that as a poet he is not different in kind from other men, but only in degree—he feels and thinks more intensely. He "detains" the reader because of the importance of his subject and his authority in presenting it. Baillie acknowledges, "I am not possessed of that confidence in my own powers, which enables the concealed genius, under the pressure of present discouragement, to pursue his labors in security, looking firmly forward to other more enlightened times for his reward" (17). Baillie asks for helpful criticism and apologizes for any appropriations she may unconsciously have made from other writers. Whereas Wordsworth both appeals to tradition and claims originality, Baillie says, "There are few writers who have sufficient originality of thought to strike out for themselves new ideas upon every occasion" (17). In feminist terms, Baillie sees herself as a collaborator, not as a solitary original genius. She is not so much interested in founding a career or attaining fame in posterity as she is in teaching the people of her own time.

Baillie is concerned with the effect that literature has on the mind of the reader, or that drama has on the audience. She states that "there is no mode of instruction they will so eagerly pursue, as that which lays open before them, in a more enlarged and connected view than their individual observations are capable of supplying—the varieties of the human mind" (4). For Baillie, the best literature leads to greater understanding of "human nature," not as an abstraction, but as an idea that encompasses diversity. Unlike Wordsworth, who states that his purpose is to trace "the grand and simple affections of our nature" (PrW 1:126) in the stories of common folk, Baillie wants to discover how those affections change in different circumstances. She is not as confident as Wordsworth is of the universality and permanence of the affections, although she does state that "The highest pleasure we receive from poetry, as well as from the real objects which surround us in the world, are derived from the sympathetic interest we all take in beings like ourselves" (6). For Baillie, pleasure is grounded in sympathy and identification rather than in the tension between similarity and dissimilarity.

Despite her more modest self-presentation, Baillie anticipates Wordsworth in arguing for simplicity and naturalness in literary representation and in her critique of gothic and romance. Wordsworth, however, is more dismissive than she of "frantic novels" as a mark of corrupt taste, and, as we have seen, his comments about genre are also about gender. Baillie wants to analyze the impulse toward the marvellous, but she does not impose negative gendered terms on the argument:

Our desire to know what men are in the closet as well as in the field; by the blazing hearth and at the social board, as well as in the council and the throne, is very imperfectly gratified by real history. Romance writers, therefore, stept boldly forth to supply the deficiency; and tale writers and novel writers, of many descriptions, followed after. If they have not been very skilful in their delineations of nature; if they have represented men and women speaking and acting as men and women never did speak or act; if they have caricatured both our virtues and our vices; if they have given us such pure and unmixed, or such heterogeneous combinations of character, as real life never presented, and yet have pleased and interested us; let it not be imputed to the dulness of man in discerning what is genuinely natural in himself. There are many inclinations belonging to us besides this great master-propensity of which I am treating. Our love of the grand, the beautiful, the novel, and, above all, of the marvellous, is very strong; and if we are richly fed with what we have a good relish for, we may be weaned to forget our native and favourite aliment. Yet we can never so far forget it but that we shall cling to, and acknowledge it again, whenever it is presented before us. In a work abounding with the marvellous and unnatural, if the author has any how stumbled upon an unsophisticated genuine stroke of nature, we shall immediately perceive and be delighted with it, though we are foolish enough to admire, at the same time, all the nonsense with which it is surrounded. After all the wonderful incidents, dark mysteries, and secrets revealed, which [sic] eventful novel so liberally presents to us; after the beautiful fairy-ground, and even the grand and sublime scenes of nature with which descriptive novel so often enchants us; those works which most strongly characterise human nature in the middling and lower classes of society; where it is to be discovered by stronger and more unequivocal marks, will ever be the most popular.

(5–6)

Rather than simply dismiss the appeal of the marvellous, Baillie places it in the context of a desire to know more about personal and domestic life, and not just the military and social chronicles of "real history." Baillie also uses the metaphor of taste and appetite, but rather than seeing the reader's taste as a corrupted craving for incident and event, Baillie uses a metaphor of maternal nourishment: readers have been weaned from their "native and favourite aliment" by their relish for the more refined products. But they never lose their taste for what is native and

natural. Baillie goes on to imply that this appeal is most strongly associated with the "middling and lower classes of society," thus anticipating Wordsworth's theory. Even the inclusiveness of Baillie's language—"men and women speaking"—suggests the wider possibilities of human discourse.

To conclude the paragraph Baillie introduces the familiar pairing of art and nature, using the metaphor of landscape to underscore the value she places on the natural and native as opposed to artful cultivation of the unknown plants:

For though great pains have been taken in our higher sentimental novels to interest us in the delicacies, embarrassments, and artificial distresses of the more refined part of society, they have never been able to cope in the public opinion with these. The one is a dressed and beautiful pleasure-ground, in which we are enchanted for a while, among the delicate and unknown plants of artful cultivation: the other is a rough forest of our native land; the oak, the elm, the hazel, and the bramble are there; and amidst the endless varieties of its paths we can wander forever. Into whatever scenes the novelist may conduct us, what objects soever he may present to our view, still is our attention most sensibly awake to every touch faithful to nature; still are we upon the watch for every thing that speaks to us of ourselves.

(6)

Whereas Wordsworth sees the reading public as so sated with extravagance that it may be incapable of appreciating tales of common life and basic human affections, Baillie seems to have faith that readers will respond with sympathy to "natural" writing. She does not construct a resisting or negligent reader as a defense for the possibility that her works will not be well received. Instead, she implies that failure will mean that her works lack the human appeal of that "native and favourite aliment."

Wordsworth's uneasiness in the Preface—uneasiness with the direction his society is taking and with what he regards as the corrupted taste of his readership—is compounded by his uneasiness with the role of the poet: "there is a numerous class of critics who, when they stumble upon these prosaisms as they call them, imagine that they have made a notable discovery, and exult over the Poet as over a man ignorant of his profession" (132, my emphasis). Wordsworth fears the judgment of other professionals, the critics. He is less concerned in this passage with poetic diction per se than he is with rhetorical strategy and with his own status as a professional who is not a hack writer. He worries about what his so-called prosaisms reveal about himself and the kind of poetic ambitions he holds. Wordsworth's preoccupation is all the more intense because in

the 1800 Preface he is no longer presenting himself as a collaborator in an anonymous volume, but as a poet named W. Wordsworth who has been encouraged by friends to write this preface to his volumes.

Perhaps Wordsworth reveals such anxiety in the Preface and the letters of the period because he was unsure of himself as an actor in the prescribed middle-class male script: his brothers were following the conventional paths into law (Richard), the East India Company (John), and the clergy (Christopher), but at thirty William was still a little-acknowledged poet. In a later letter, Mary Wordsworth revealed that the elders in her family had regarded William as a "Vagabond" at the time: "My father's Bachelor Brother Henry,—upon whom we were, as Orphans, in some measure dependent … had no high opinion of Young Men without some Profession, or Calling."^[25] Wordsworth's task in the years following his trip to Germany in 1798–99 was to establish himself as a poet. He felt compelled to justify this choice to his formidable elders and to the world; he could not be a man ignorant of his profession.

"Tintern Abbey": The Sister's Lost Narrative

In 1798, in the poem strategically placed at the end of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had meditated on his vocation as poet, this time by addressing his hopes and dreams to Dorothy Wordsworth. John Barrell and David Simpson have (in separate pieces) recently written on the place of Dorothy in "Tintern Abbey" and in William's poetry generally.^[26] Simpson underscores Barrell's argument that the language of "Tintern Abbey," the abstract language of educated males of Wordsworth's time, would preclude a female as a reader because she would not have had access to the education needed to use and understand such language. Therefore, according to this argument, Wordsworth addresses Dorothy in "Tintern Abbey" in a language that she cannot understand. In Simpson's words, "it may be that Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint entry into the literary marketplace of 1798 is in fact prefigured (in the preparation of the volume) and concluded (as one reads through it) by the marginalization of the exemplary female, who may be a worshipful or proleptic companion but who can never be a reader" (550).

Leaving aside the irony of this comment when we think of Wordsworth's female readership, I would suggest that the emphasis on language here misses the point. It is not so much that Dorothy Wordsworth is excluded by William's language (even though she herself

might have used a more concrete language); the main point is that William turns to her in "Tintern Abbey" and sees, in her "wild eyes," himself. He describes both her past and her future in terms he has invented. She may embody "nature and the language of the sense" (108) to him, but he has defined her in terms of his own story. She is present as the poet composes himself and his poem, and she assists in the processes leading to its publication in the Lyrical Ballads. Nevertheless, the core of "Tintern Abbey" is Wordsworth's narrative of a young man's life: his progression from the "glad animal movements" (74) of his "boyish days" (73) through the "dizzy raptures" (85) and "aching joys" (84) of eroticized adolescence to the present time of subdued thoughts about humanity.

There is nothing new in seeing "Tintern Abbey" as a familiar Wordsworthian "scene of instruction," with the brother projecting his sense of reality and his morality onto the devoted sister.^[27] But I would argue not that the sister lacks the necessary language to form her life but that she is denied her own narrative in the context of Wordsworth's masculine narrative of loss and desired restoration. Carolyn Heilbrun clarifies this distinction between language and narrative in Writing a Woman's Life:

If I had to emphasize the lack either of narrative or of language to the formation of new women's lives, I would unquestionably emphasize narrative. Much, of a profound and perceptive nature, has been written about the problem of women coping with male language that will not say what they wish: we remember Woolf's enigmatic statement that Jane Austen was the first to write a woman's sentence. Some part of us responds to this, as to the words of Anne Elliot in Persuasion —"Men have had every advantage of us in telling their story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands."—and of Bathsheba in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd —"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs." But what we speak of here … is not so much women's lack of a language as their failure to speak profoundly to one another.^[28]

Or, as Heilbrun goes on to argue, the failure to invent new narratives, new life patterns for themselves. In 1798—and, as Austen's Anne Elliot knew, a few years later—this was much easier for a man than for a woman to do. But if women were—and are—to have their own narratives, they must be more than good listeners, muses, or footnotes.

Wordsworth plotted his life against convention (he did not enter the clergy or the bar), and in The Prelude he attempts to justify his choice to himself and eventually to the world. He uses the archetype of the

romantic quest to dramatize not how he conquered the world but how he formed himself. Wordsworth presents himself as the typical Englishman who has lived through the failure of revolutionary hope and who needs to reestablish his life. But while Wordsworth describes himself here and in "Tintern Abbey" as suffering through the revolution and its aftermath, Dorothy remained in England, viewing events from afar and dependent on relatives for her home. Until she set up a household with William in 1795, Dorothy lived the life of an orphan, shuttled from one family to another.

Wordsworth makes no mention of Dorothy's real circumstances or possibilities in "Tintern Abbey." But the records of history and literature make clear that her culture placed limitations on her life. Seen in the light of Heilbrun's theory, the two plots Dorothy Wordsworth might have learned from literature were the marriage plot and the plot of abandonment and death. Historians such as Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have taught us that another familiar middle-class plot—and the one, of course, that Dorothy Wordsworth chose—had the unmarried sister or daughter live in the household of a brother or her father; such a sister contributed immeasurably to the economy of the household and helped to raise the children.^[29] In the fiction of "Tintern Abbey," this life is not considered, although in the years to come Wordsworth was to praise such a domestic mission. In 1798, however, before settling at Grasmere, Wordsworth did not yet envision his vocation in relation to his sister's work.

In "Tintern Abbey" the beloved sister silently serves as a mirror in which the poet can gaze into his past and hope for his future. It is fitting that when Shelley critiques Wordsworthian visionary egotism in "Alastor," he endows the visionary with Dorothy's wild eyes, and as the visionary approaches death, those eyes eerily "seemed with their serene and azure smiles / To beckon him" (491–92) into the caverns of selfhood and death. But in "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth sees Dorothy's reflective and subsidiary role as potentially redemptive—as a way that he can avert the finality of death. He imagines that in redeeming him she will be able to save herself, but he does not acknowledge the differences in their experiences of the momentous events of the 1790s and in their daily lives when they were apart. What if Dorothy had gone to London or Paris like Mary Wollstonecraft or Helen Maria Williams? What if she had taken her literary talents seriously? What if she had borne an illegitimate child?

Instead of posing such disruptive questions, Wordsworth frames his narrative so that Dorothy, representing the possibilities of the beautiful, tempers and calms his unsettling memories:

… and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies

(137–42)

Theresa Kelley has read "Tintern Abbey" as a poem in which the beautiful subdues the sublime and revolutionary passions.^[30] Once again, this movement to the beautiful is subtly gendered: the image of the inner mansion, a place of refuge from the world, prefigures the ideal of Victorian domesticity. This image of mental harmony and refuge, Wordsworth's version of Milton's "paradise within," is related both to "the neglected mansion-house" (two-part Prelude 2:151) on Coniston and to Rydal Mount, the comfortable house of later years.

But what of the disruptive questions that do not fit into this version of Wordsworth's life story? If we are to be other than resisting readers of Wordsworth, then we must explain why "Tintern Abbey" continues to hold appeal for readers, in spite of the poet's blindness. It is true that the male poet denies his sister her own story, but he does bless her life with the highest love he can imagine:

… Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee …

(135–38)

Also, in focusing on the transference of his hopes and joys to his sister, Wordsworth demonstrates his dependence on her, even as he constructs his myth of male development. In this poem that closed the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, the poem in which Wordsworth frames his own narrative of loss and recovery, he acknowledges his "dear, dear Sister" (122) as his most valued audience and his dearest friend. In comparison to the marginalized women of the other poems in the Lyrical Ballads, many of them (the mad mother, the forsaken Indian woman, Martha Ray) driven to the brink by their distress and suffering, Dorothy Wordsworth is given a privileged place as she stands with the poet sur-

veying the Wye Valley. In acknowledging her importance in his myth of redemption, Wordsworth may unconsciously be trying to redeem the abandoned women who fill the pages of the volume—and perhaps even the abandoned woman in the narrative of his own life. Wordsworth idealizes his sister, but he stands with her above the Wye Valley in "Tintern Abbey" and never in fact abandons her.

I disagree with Diane Long Hoeveler's conclusion that "William is speaking, after all, from the growing realization that his imagination is failing and … he is, as any poet would be, bitter. He chooses, probably unconsciously, to displace his bitterness onto Dorothy, for if she is for him the emblem of the feminine within, then she is the cause of his imaginative decay."^[31] There is no doubt that Wordsworth feared the decay of his "genial spirits" (113), but, I believe, in 1798 that fear is motivated by his sense of mortality rather than by a crisis of confidence in his poetic powers. Wordsworth also feared that he would not find a larger audience for his poetry than the ever-responsive sister to whom his meditation is addressed. But this is still different from blaming her for his anticipated failure of imagination.

The Patrimonial Fields of "Michael"

At the time that Wordsworth was contemplating the Preface, he was also writing "Michael," a poem implicitly concerned with the poet's vocation. Late in the planning of the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, "Michael" was added to the volume in lieu of Coleridge's "Christabel."^[32] Many have speculated on why Wordsworth insisted on substituting his own poem; clearly he saw the importance of "Michael" to his poetic program and to his sense of himself as a poet in 1800. In fact, there is a strong link between the role and responsibility of the poet in "Michael" and Wordsworth's self-dramatization as a publishing poet in the Preface.

In both "Michael" and the Preface, Wordsworth works out what it means to be a poet in an age of cultural crisis—more specifically, what it means to be a male poet in a patriarchal society. In "Michael" Wordsworth's focus is on the bond established between father and son. The poet-narrator writes for the delight of "the few natural hearts" who will be his "second self" when he is gone, thus casting himself as a father-figure for succeeding generations of poets. But the poet is also a second Luke who fulfills the promise in poetry that Luke could not fulfill in his action. By privileging the male bond in "Michael," Wordsworth also privileges the heroic ideals associated with the bond, in this case a

heroism linked with the biblical law and biblical language, with a covenant that binds father irrevocably to son, even if the son does not fulfill the promise. In "Michael" the father-son relationship is rooted in Michael's love of his land, "the patrimonial fields" he wishes so desperately to preserve.

Wordsworth also wants to preserve the model of the family and domestic relationships linked to these patrimonial fields, as his letters of the period demonstrate. For instance, he laments to Charles James Fox in the now much-quoted letter that "the wife no longer prepares with her own hand a meal for her husband, the produce of his labour; there is little doing in his house in which his affections can be interested, and but little left in it which he can love."^[33] Wordsworth sees the wife's role in terms of the husband's happiness; she serves him with acts of devotion that make the home the center of affection and love, work and productivity. In "Michael," the narrator describes Isabel as "a woman of stirring life, / Whose heart was in her house" (81–82). But both Michael and the narrator seem to value an abstract principle, individual ownership of landed property, to such an extent that the actual family and domestic affections are sacrificed.^[34]

Michael's feelings toward his son, however, are not conventionally masculine, even though his patrimonial concern seems to determine his decisions. Interestingly, Michael establishes a bond with his infant son by sharing in his care:

Old Michael, while he was a babe in arms,
Had done him female service, not alone
For pastime and delight, as is the use
Of fathers, but with patient mind enforced
To acts of tenderness; and he had rocked
His cradle, as with a woman's gentle hand.

(153–58)

Wordsworth indicates that this father-son bond was unusually profound by describing Michael as wanting to perform maternal "acts of tenderness." Even within the context of a poem that emphasizes the legacy from father to son, Wordsworth dramatizes a character who values and reinforces the feminine. Wordsworth thus subverts a definition of roles for women and men based on biology. Instead, he redefines the role of fatherhood for his shepherd Michael; he reminds us that the shepherd is after all a nurturing (and therefore conventionally feminine) figure to his flock, in an implicit allusion to the conventional religious symbolism of the pastoral.

But despite these impulses toward nurturing and the feminine in the early descriptions of Michael and Luke, in the course of "Michael" the voice that might have expressed a more compromising view regarding the property—the voice of Isabel—does not prevail. Wordsworth contrasts her silent thoughts (255–73) with Michael's word and his law. When Isabel first hears of Michael's plans, she is worried but does not speak. Instead, the narrator gives us insight into her hopeful thoughts that Luke may follow in the path of another parish boy and return to his native village a rich and bountiful man. After the letter comes from the kinsman, Michael simply says:

"He shall depart to-morrow." To this word
The Housewife answered, talking much of things
Which, if at such short notice he should go,
Would surely be forgotten. But at length
She gave consent, and Michael was at ease.

(317–21)

Michael's "word," with its commanding authority, is contrasted with Isabel's "talking" and, later, her bustling activity. Wordsworth controls the influence of Isabel's voice on Michael's word. Michael's values prevail and Michael's courage is celebrated, but Isabel's silent tragedy reminds us of what might have been. The father-son bond, however, remains central to the story, in which the narrator had already explained that

The Shepherd, if he loved himself, must needs
Have loved his Helpmate; but to Michael's heart
This son of his old age was yet more dear—

(141–43)

From the outset Wordsworth reinforces his relationship to this bond and to the story of lost inheritance. As many readers have noted,^[35] he substitutes himself and his poem for the broken covenant between Michael and Luke, relating Michael's tale

For the delight of a few natural hearts;
And, with yet fonder feeling, for the sake
Of youthful Poets, who among these hills
Will be my second self when I am gone.

(36–39)

Wordsworth seemed particularly attached to this story about property and ownership and patrimonial inheritance in the fall of 1800, when he was revising the Preface and preparing for the second edition of the Lyri-

cal Ballads. In place of the questionable form and subject matter of the feminized gothic tale "Christabel," he substituted the biblical and patriarchal "Michael." Wordsworth's placement of "Michael" thus fulfills the anti-gothic promise of the Preface with a sober narrative that raises low and rustic life to the level of tragedy.

Home at Dove Cottage

When, in 1800, Wordsworth settled in what would later be known as Dove Cottage, he was as close as he had come to owning property and working his own plot of ground (Heinzelman, R & F, 53 and passim). But he had more to do in carving out his literary place as he worked toward claiming both figurative and literal ownership of his poems. In contrast to the anonymous publication of the 1798 volume of the Lyrical Ballads, the 1800 edition bore the name "W. Wordsworth," with Coleridge receiving no credit. Furthermore, Wordsworth actually became the owner of the copyright to the Lyrical Ballads in that year. And, as we have seen, Wordsworth was concerned about his readership not in the Preface alone but also in the letters he wrote to such public figures as Charles James Fox after the second edition was published.

Wordsworth's many gestures toward a larger audience during this time all point to his desire not only to be read but to be read in a certain way—by readers who would recognize the social and political implications of his poetry, by readers who had an "accurate taste" for the poetry they consumed. His authority derives, not from personal status, but from poetic tradition: "the common inheritance of Poets." But as he cultivates this wider audience, writing letters and sending volumes to readers, Wordsworth also depends on the moral and emotional support of a very small audience: Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, and then Mary Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson; later he will rely on Dora Wordsworth and Isabella Fenwick. The "man speaking to men" depends on the sympathetic reading of (mostly) women. Marlon Ross goes so far as to claim that Coleridge, in fact, becomes feminized in Wordsworth's representation of him as a reader both willing to sympathize and in need of instruction.^[36]

Women not only could be readers, but they were the first readers and recorders of much of Wordsworth's poetry. Wordsworth's poetic vocation was nurtured and supported at home as his reputation made its way into the public sphere. The story of his composition of "Resolution and Independence," a poem concerned with the fate of poets, reveals the ex-

tent to which Wordsworth required sympathetic readers. In May 1802, after he finished his painstaking composition of "The Leech-Gatherer" (later "Resolution and Independence"), Wordsworth sent a copy to his future wife, Mary Hutchinson, and her sister Sara. The poet got more of a response than he had bargained for. We know from his return letter to them (their letter is lost) that the women complained of tedium in the presentation of the leech-gatherer's family history. Wordsworth responds to their criticism by arguing that "everything is tedious when one does not read with the feelings of the Author."^[37] Dorothy Wordsworth seconds her brother's comments with a lecture of her own on how to read William's work:

When you happen to be displeased with what you suppose to be the tendency or moral of any poem which William writes, ask yourself whether you have hit upon the real tendency and true moral, and above all never think that he writes for no reason merely because a thing happened—and when you feel any poem of his to be tedious, ask yourself in what spirit it was written—whether merely to tell the tale and be through with it, or to illustrate a particular character or truth etc. etc.

(Early Years, 367)

According to both Dorothy and William, the reader must be in sympathy with the feelings of the author. Dorothy Wordsworth established a pattern that was followed by the other devoted women of the household. The Wordsworth women learned not only to read William's poetry but also to read the poet and respond to his needs. Dorothy's little lecture on "The Leech-Gatherer" can be seen as a lesson for his future wife and sister-in-law on how to live with William. But while both William and Dorothy were quick to correct the sisters, William went on to alter the poem according to their suggestions, revealing that he not only needed their emotional support but also trusted their ability as readers. They were able to make suggestions because, like Dorothy and unlike the world of contemporary reviews, they cultivated an atmosphere of trust and sympathy. Perhaps it was these sympathetic first readers who became the models for Wordsworth's picture of "the People" who would one day appreciate his poetry.

The Wordsworth women would essentially replace Coleridge in the role of nurturer and supporter of William's genius, for by the early years of the century the old intimacy between the friends was lost. When Wordsworth addressed and patronized a heartsick and lonely Coleridge in The Prelude, their roles had already begun to change. In the autumn of 1803 Coleridge complained that Wordsworth was self-centered and

"hypercondriacal" from "living wholly among Devotees —having every the [sic] minutest Thing, almost his Eating and Drinking done for him by his Sister, or his Wife."^[38] Coleridge envies the domestic support that made Wordsworth's poetry possible. Later, Coleridge became a very different kind of reader of Wordsworth in the Biographia Literaria (1817), enumerating Wordsworth's weaknesses with a (for Wordsworth) painfully incisive intelligence. But the Wordsworth women never relinquished their intellectual and emotional support of Wordsworth's poetic career. As we shall see, they nurtured him through the difficult early years of the century and later shared in his success with readers—many of them women—in the 1820s and 1830s.