1. See, for instance, Margaret Homans, in the first chapter of Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Mary Jacobus, "The Law of/and Gender: Genre Theory and The Prelude," Diacritics 14 (1984): 47-57, later published in Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books Nine to Thirteen," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23 (1981): 324-60; later published in In Other Worlds: Essays in Culture and Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987). More recently Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), has seen Wordsworth and the other male Romantics as poets who appropriate the feminine. For a strong challenge to these views, see Susan J. Wolfson, "Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William," in R&F, 139-66. See also Laura E. Haigwood, ''Oedipal Revolution in the Lyrical Ballads," Centennial Review 33 (Fall 1989): 468-89.

2. Keats refers to "the wordsworthian [sic] or egotistical sublime" in the letter to Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, 157. (References to Keats's letters are from the edition by Robert Gittings, Letters of John Keats [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987]. Letters are identified by date and page number.) The movement from solitude to relationship is an important part of John Jones's argument in The Egotistical Sublime. Jones sees Wordsworth moving away from the sublimity of solitude in the course of his poetry; the gender distinctions, although not explicit in this pre-feminist work, are implicit in Jones's argument, as well as in his references to the attitudes of Coleridge, Keats, and Hazlitt toward Wordsworth (see pages 29, 47, and passim). More recently, Thomas A. Vogler has seen this move toward relationship in psychoanalytic terms, arguing that Wordsworth spent most of his life "in recovery of a primal relationship with an idealized maternal 'nature,'" whereas I see Wordsworth as moved by both a masculine and feminine nature. I would also disagree with Vogler's assumption that "She was a Phantom of delight" refers to Dorothy Wordsworth rather than Mary Wordsworth. See Vogler's " 'A Spirit, Yet a Woman Too!' Dorothy and William Wordsworth," in Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners, ed. Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984), 243.

3. For an example of this argument, see David Simpson, "Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender: What Is the Subject of Wordsworth's 'Gipsies'?" in South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (Summer 1989): 541-67.

4. Wordsworth also follows Burke in linking the sublime to feelings of pain, but pain held in check by distance. Wordsworth knew Burke's aesthetic and political theory in both the Enquiry and the Reflections on the Revolution in France.

See James K. Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), for an elaboration of Wordsworth's complicated relationship to Burke's thought. For a brief but incisive analysis of gender in Burke's poetics, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 129-31. Meena Alexander also touches on this gendered dichotomy in Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (Savage, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1989), 29-30. See, in addition, Mellor's discussion in Romanticism and Gender, especially "Domesticating the Sublime," 85-106. Although Burke is the much more likely direct source for Wordsworth, Kant also analyzes these qualities in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960).

5. Without explicitly discussing issues of gender, Theresa M. Kelley, in Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), argues that a "rhetorical competition" between figures of the beautiful and the sublime forms the basis of Wordsworth's aesthetics. I have benefited throughout from Kelley's ideas and from her sense of the movement of Wordsworth's imagination from the sublime to the beautiful.

6. William Wordsworth: Guide to the Lakes, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (1906; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 35.

7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1958), 63.

8. This is actually a description of Windermere, from Arthur Young's Six Month Tour, vol. 3, quoted in Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire (1784; rpt. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989), 69.

9. See Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), especially chap. 3, 57-87.

10. See Moorman 1:438-42 on Wordsworth's financial anxieties, as well as Wallace Douglas, Wordsworth: The Construction of a Personality (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1968). See also David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1987), for an analysis of Wordsworth's financial and familial problems.

1. See, for instance, Margaret Homans, in the first chapter of Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Mary Jacobus, "The Law of/and Gender: Genre Theory and The Prelude," Diacritics 14 (1984): 47-57, later published in Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books Nine to Thirteen," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23 (1981): 324-60; later published in In Other Worlds: Essays in Culture and Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987). More recently Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), has seen Wordsworth and the other male Romantics as poets who appropriate the feminine. For a strong challenge to these views, see Susan J. Wolfson, "Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William," in R&F, 139-66. See also Laura E. Haigwood, ''Oedipal Revolution in the Lyrical Ballads," Centennial Review 33 (Fall 1989): 468-89.

2. Keats refers to "the wordsworthian [sic] or egotistical sublime" in the letter to Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, 157. (References to Keats's letters are from the edition by Robert Gittings, Letters of John Keats [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987]. Letters are identified by date and page number.) The movement from solitude to relationship is an important part of John Jones's argument in The Egotistical Sublime. Jones sees Wordsworth moving away from the sublimity of solitude in the course of his poetry; the gender distinctions, although not explicit in this pre-feminist work, are implicit in Jones's argument, as well as in his references to the attitudes of Coleridge, Keats, and Hazlitt toward Wordsworth (see pages 29, 47, and passim). More recently, Thomas A. Vogler has seen this move toward relationship in psychoanalytic terms, arguing that Wordsworth spent most of his life "in recovery of a primal relationship with an idealized maternal 'nature,'" whereas I see Wordsworth as moved by both a masculine and feminine nature. I would also disagree with Vogler's assumption that "She was a Phantom of delight" refers to Dorothy Wordsworth rather than Mary Wordsworth. See Vogler's " 'A Spirit, Yet a Woman Too!' Dorothy and William Wordsworth," in Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners, ed. Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984), 243.

3. For an example of this argument, see David Simpson, "Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender: What Is the Subject of Wordsworth's 'Gipsies'?" in South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (Summer 1989): 541-67.

4. Wordsworth also follows Burke in linking the sublime to feelings of pain, but pain held in check by distance. Wordsworth knew Burke's aesthetic and political theory in both the Enquiry and the Reflections on the Revolution in France.

See James K. Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), for an elaboration of Wordsworth's complicated relationship to Burke's thought. For a brief but incisive analysis of gender in Burke's poetics, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 129-31. Meena Alexander also touches on this gendered dichotomy in Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (Savage, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1989), 29-30. See, in addition, Mellor's discussion in Romanticism and Gender, especially "Domesticating the Sublime," 85-106. Although Burke is the much more likely direct source for Wordsworth, Kant also analyzes these qualities in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960).

5. Without explicitly discussing issues of gender, Theresa M. Kelley, in Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), argues that a "rhetorical competition" between figures of the beautiful and the sublime forms the basis of Wordsworth's aesthetics. I have benefited throughout from Kelley's ideas and from her sense of the movement of Wordsworth's imagination from the sublime to the beautiful.

6. William Wordsworth: Guide to the Lakes, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (1906; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 35.

7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1958), 63.

8. This is actually a description of Windermere, from Arthur Young's Six Month Tour, vol. 3, quoted in Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire (1784; rpt. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989), 69.

9. See Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), especially chap. 3, 57-87.

10. See Moorman 1:438-42 on Wordsworth's financial anxieties, as well as Wallace Douglas, Wordsworth: The Construction of a Personality (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1968). See also David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1987), for an analysis of Wordsworth's financial and familial problems.

11. Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: J. Robson, 1794), 47-49.

12. I am thinking, for instance, of Marjorie Levinson's chapter on "Tintern Abbey" in her Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

13. The Norton editors note that Wordsworth wrote such an account, the "Discharged Soldier," in January-February 1798, which became lines 363-504 in book 4 of the 1805 Prelude. The editors also note that Wordsworth echoes both Cowper's "The Winter Evening" and The Task, as well as the card game in Pope's The Rape of the Lock.

14. I borrow Kurt Heinzelman's term for Rydal Mount: "that manor house whose many-acred grounds William himself laid out and landscaped into a private garden" (R&F, 57). He argues that the Wordsworths' radical ideas about

work and home at Grasmere became a "cult of domesticity" at Rydal Mount: "The Cult of Domesticity: Dorothy and William Wordsworth at Grasmere," in R&F, 52-78.

15. For a discussion of the possibilities of the female sublime in regard to later women writers, see Patricia Yaeger, "Toward a Female Sublime," in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 191-212.

16. See for instance, Robert Con Davis, "The Structure of the Picturesque: Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals," The Wordsworth Circle 9 (1978): 45-49.

17. Martin Price, "The Picturesque Moment," in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 277. I am indebted to William Snyder and other members of the NEH seminar at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1989, "Gender and English Romanticism," for lively and suggestive discussions on gender and aesthetic categories. See also Snyder's "Mother Nature's Other Natures: Landscape in Women's Writing," Women's Studies 21 (1992): 143-62, for a fine analysis of gender and the picturesque; my comments on this subject are influenced by Snyder's thinking.

1. William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Vol. 1: The Early Years, 1787-1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 122.

2. See, for instance, Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), for a Marxist critique of this presumed change from a concern with "consumption" to a preoccupation with "reception" (137-50).

3. Peter J. Manning analyzes Wordsworth's construct of the "People" in "The White Doe of Rylstone, The Convention of Cintra, and the History of a Career," in his Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 165-94.

4. Morris Eaves, "Romantic Expressive Theory and Blake's Idea of Audience," PMLA 95 (1980): 790-91; later published in William Blake's Theory of Art, 171-204 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

5. Except where noted, I refer to the 1800 text of the Preface. The 1802 version with various changes added over the years is identified as "1850" by Owen and Smyser; I follow their notation.

6. I discuss this at length in "'A History / Homely and Rude': Genre and Style in Wordsworth's 'Michael,'" SEL 29 (1989): 622-36.

7. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).

8. I am referring, of course, to Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

9. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 183.

10. This is from R. S. Mackenzie's Life of Charles Dickens, 1870, quoted in Markham L. Peacock, Jr., The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), 243.

11. See Bradford Keyes Mudge, "The Man with Two Brains: Gothic Novels, Popular Culture, Literary History," PMLA 107 (January 1992): 92-104, for an extended discussion of the cultural implications of the rise of the novel and of the growing number of women as readers and writers.

12. See also Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

13. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957), 51.

14. Cora Kaplan makes this point in "Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism," in Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 47, in contrasting the male author's freedom with Wollstonecraft's repression of sexuality and pleasure in the Vindication.

15. Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 26.

16. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 114.

17. See Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1987), 63-67.

18. Donald H. Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed, 9 vols. (New York: Garland, 1972), 2:432-36.

19. Women Writers Project Newsletter 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 2.

20. Stuart Curran, "The I Altered," in R&F, 185-207.

21. See Ross, Contours of Masculine Desire, especially chap. 6, 187-231.

22. "Now it is remarkable that, excepting the nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of Paradise Lost and the Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination" (PrW 3:73).

23. I am indebted to Catherine Burroughs for first introducing me to Baillie's "Introductory Discourse" in 1989 during the NEH seminar "Gender and British Romanticism." My text for Baillie is The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie (1851; rpt. New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976).

24. Stuart Curran mentions the importance of this work in "The I Altered," and Marlon Ross draws attention to several general parallels between Baillie's "Discourse" and Wordsworth's Preface in his brief biographical essay, "Joanna Baillie," in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 93, ed. John R. Greenfield (Detroit: Gale Research, 1990), 3-15, and in The Contours of Masculine Desire, 257-59.

25. Mary Wordsworth, The Letters of Mary Wordsworth, 1800-1855, ed. Mary E. Burton (1958; rpt. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1979), xxv.

26. See, again, Simpson's "Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender," 541-67, and John Barrell's "The Uses of Dorothy: 'The Language of the Sense' in 'Tintern

Abbey,' " in Poetry, Language, and Politics (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), 137-67.

27. I am thinking of Margaret Homans's analysis at the beginning of Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). I borrow Homans's term, "scene of instruction," throughout.

28. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 43.

29. See Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 348-53 and passim.

30. Kelley, Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics, 61.

31. Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny, 96.

32. On the formation of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads in relation to "Michael" and "Christabel," see Susan Eilenberg, " 'Michael,' 'Christabel,' and the Poetry of Possession," Criticism 30 (Spring 1988): 205-24.

33. Early Years, 314.

34. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). In Gilligan's terms, an abstract principle overrides a feminine ethic of care based on compromise.

35. See, for instance, Peter J. Manning's "Michael, Luke, and Wordsworth," in Reading Romantics, 35-52.

36. Ross, Contours of Masculine Desire, 87-111.

37. Early Years, 367.

38. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-71), 2:1013.

1. David V. Erdman, "Wordsworth as Heartsworth; or, Was Regicide the Prophetic Ground of Those 'Moral Questions'?" in The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions Between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Michael C. Jaye, and Betty T. Bennett (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 15. Not all recent students of Wordsworth have seen the connection between his revolutionary and his sexual politics. For instance, in Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Nicholas Roe mentions Annette Vallon briefly, but does not focus on this relationship.

2. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Mary Moorman (2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 127.

3. Moorman (1:565) attributes seven sonnets to Calais, but Reed assigns with fairly strong certainty five sonnets to this period: "Calais, August, 1802" ("Is it a Reed that's shaken by the wind"), "Composed by the Sea-Side, near Calais, August, 1802" ("Fair Star of Evening, Splendor of the West"), ''It is a Beauteous Evening," ''To a Friend, Composed near Calais" ("Jones! when from Calais southward you and I"), and "Calais, August 15th, 1802" ("Festivals have I seen

that were not names"). As to the two others attributed by Moorman, Reed acknowledges that it is possible that "To Toussaint L'Ouverture" may belong to the trip, but concludes that "On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic" "does not seem on balance certainly assignable to this month'' (Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800-1815 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975], 190).

4. See Irene Tayler, "By Peculiar Grace: Wordsworth in 1802," in Evidence of the Imagination, 119-41.

5. David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire—A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times (1954; rpt. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), 74-76.

6. Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals, 152.

7. My text for this and all quotations from Wordsworth's poetry in this chapter (with the exception of the versions of the channel-crossing sonnet first called "The Banished Negroes") is William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford Authors series (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), which provides the earliest version of each poem.

8. In thinking of Wordsworth's conception of the dynamics of the sonnet form in relation to Milton, I have learned from Janel M. Mueller, "On Genesis in Genre: Milton's Politicizing of the Sonnet in 'Captain or Colonel,'" Renaissance Genres, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski, 213-40, Harvard Studies in English 14 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).

9. Kurt Heinzelman discusses Wordsworth's relationship to Milton in a similar context in "The Cult of Domesticity," 63-65 and passim. My work on these sonnets was originally published at the same time as " 'The weight of too much liberty': Genre and Gender in Wordsworth's Calais Sonnets," Criticism (Spring 1988): 189-203.

10. Lee M. Johnson, Wordsworth and the Sonnet, Anglistica 19 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1973), 48-49.

11. J. Hillis Miller, "The Still Heart: Poetic Form in Wordsworth," New Literary History 2 (Winter 1971): 303.

12. Selections from the Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. S. K. Heninger, Jr. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1970), lines 291-95.

13. Spivak, "Sex and History in The Prelude," 326.

14. On this subject see Jacobus, "The Law of/and Gender," as well as Deborah Kennedy's "Revolutionary Tales: Helen Maria Williams's Letters from France and William Wordsworth's 'Vaudracour and Julia,'" The Wordsworth Circle 21 (Summer 1990): 109-14.

15. See, for instance, Markham L. Peacock Jr., The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), 187-88. Also, Manning discusses what I find to be Wordsworth's more typical, indirect biblical references in "Wordsworth's Intimations Ode and Its Epigraphs," in Reading Romantics, 68-84.

16. The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, ed. George Arthur Buttrick et al., 5 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), 1:21-22. See also the Theological. Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1965),

3:824-26, for readings of the term. I thank T. W. Lewis for his help with these sources.

17. Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 69.

18. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, ed. Andrew and Judith Hook (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985), 376.

19. In comparing Wordsworth's persona to the lover-speaker in the Petrarchan tradition, I am thinking of this lyric tradition in the terms developed by Nona Fienberg in "The Emergence of Stella in Astrophil and Stella," SEL 25 (1985): 5-19.

20. Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals, 153.

21. Reed, Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 191.

22. A related sonnet in protest of the French government is "To Toussaint L'Ouverture." For the political background of Wordsworth's treatment of this well-known historical figure see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d ed. (1938; rpt. New York: Random House, 1963). Toussaint L'Ouverture was betrayed by the French, brought to Europe, and imprisoned on 24 August 1802 at Fort de Joux in the French Alps, where he died of cold and starvation on 7 April 1803.

23. I have constructed this 1803 text from the notes provided by Jared Curtis in the Cornell Wordsworth. See Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

24. Recueil général, annoté, des lois, décrets, ordannances, etc. 1789-1830, 16 vols. (Paris: A l'administration du journal des notaires et des avocats, 1836), 9:361. I thank David Combe of the Tulane University Law Library for his help in finding the ordinance.

Not much has been written on this edict. Shelby T. McCloy, The Negro in France (1961; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1973), mentions briefly that "the census was required by the law of July 2, 1802, which specified that every Negro or mulatto, other than those serving in the French army or navy, who arrived at a seaport was to be put in a depot and sent to the colonies as soon as possible. Negroes and mulattoes of foreign crews, if found on French soil, were likewise to be reported and placed in the depots" (126).

William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with the African: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), argues that the ordinance was in line with prerevolutionary racist paranoia about blacks. He quotes an official document from 1777: "The Negroes are multiplying every day in France. They marry Europeans, the houses of prostitutes are infected by them; the colours mix, the blood is changing ... these slaves, if they return to America, bring with them the spirit of freedom, independence and equality, which they communicate to others" (111).

25. For a discussion of the reporting in the British press, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (New York: Verso, 1988), 251-52: "The British press, which would have been happy to celebrate his [Toussaint's] execution in 1796, gave harrowing accounts of his imprisonment and death."

26. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1989), 476.

27. See Mary Jacobus, "Geometric Science and Romantic History, or Wordsworth, Newton, and the Slave Trade," in her Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference, 77.

28. On the British abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1838), see James Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776-1838 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986).

29. See Alan Richardson's "Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony in Blake's 'The Little Black Boy,'" Papers on Language and Literature 26 (1990): 233-48. Wordsworth was familiar with abolitionist discourse. He corresponded with James Montgomery, and the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and his wife Catherine were, for a while, neighbors of his in the Lake District. Catherine Clarkson became one of Dorothy Wordsworth's lifelong friends and correspondents. Allusions to Thomas Clarkson's work for the abolitionist cause are scattered throughout the letters of the Wordsworth family. In Thomas Clarkson, the Friend of Slaves (1936; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970), especially the later chapters, Earl Leslie Griggs discusses the relationship between the Wordsworths and the Clarksons.

30. See McCloy, The Negro in France, 64-85.

31. See Richardson, "Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony," 237-39 and passim; and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992).

32. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 14. Bush also suggests that in Holloway's (sometimes mistaken for Blake's) engraving of the slave Joanna from John Stedman's Narrative, the one bare breast "hint[s] at the alleged sensuality of African women" (16).

33. According to the OED, Malthus used the word intercourse with a sexual connotation in 1798: "An illicit intercourse between the sexes." We have already seen how Wordsworth uses this and related words in the Preface in sexually charged ways.

34. See Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, 2 parts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press for the Menil Foundation, 1989). Honour is specific about the history of the painting, although Jean-Pierre Cuzin, French Painting in the Louvre (New York: Scala, 1982), 92, simply states that the painting was purchased by the Louvre in 1818. I thank Elise Smith for bringing Benoist's painting to my attention.

35. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 340, records this passage from Mary Wordsworth's journal. Although Wordsworth says in his letters that he is more impressed with the Jardin des Plantes (7 October 1820 to Lord Lonsdale, MY 2:642) than with the artworks of the Louvre, Dorothy Wordsworth makes a point of assessing their location in relation to the Louvre: "The only inconvenience is our distance from the Louvre etc, but I am so strong that to me it is nothing" (to Catherine Clarkson, 2:645). They obviously went to the "Louvre etc" frequently.

36. Honour, Image of the Black, 2:6-12.

37. In Wordsworth's Interest in Painters and Pictures (Wellesley, Mass.: Wellesley Press, 1945), Martha Hale Shackford provides evidence to show that Wordsworth had a long-standing interest in portrait painting and, because of the human interest in the subject, even preferred it to landscape painting.

38. Honour, Image of the Black, 2:12, 22. In a footnote, Honour states that "It has been suggested that the bare breast symbolizes Liberty and that the head drapery 'two meters long' shows that the subject cannot be a slave" (2:248).

39. See especially Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) for this connection. Nancy Moore Goslee, in "Slavery and Sexual Character: Questioning the Master Trope in Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion," ELH 57 (Spring 1990): 101-28, provides an analysis of the "master trope" of slavery for racial and sexual oppression in the Vindication and Visions, revealing the problems in conflating racial and gender oppression.

40. See Jacobus, "Geometric Science and Romantic History," 73.

1. For a history of Wordsworth's reputation as a conservative in the nineteenth century, see James Chandler's "'Wordsworth' After Waterloo," in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 84-111.

2. Erdman, "Wordsworth as Heartsworth," 15.

3. Donald H. Reiman, "The Poetry of Familiarity: Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Mary Hutchinson," in The Evidence of the Imagination, 170, and cf. especially 164-71; Jean Hagstrum follows this notion in chap. 3 of The Romantic Body: Love and Sexuality in Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985).

4. A version of "Laodamia" was probably completed in October 1814 and revised by February 1815 for publication in the Poems (Reed, Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 578). My text for "Laodamia" is from the Cornell Wordsworth, reading text 2; all references to variants are also to the Cornell edition. For Wordsworth's notes to the poem, I have used PW.

5. For a listing of Wordsworth's echoes of these works, see W. A. Heard's essay in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. William Knight, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 6:10-15. Wordsworth himself acknowledges his debts to Virgil, Euripides, and Pliny's Natural History in his note to "Laodamia" (PW 2:272).

6. See Moorman 2:330-34 and Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 204-10. On the subject of Dorothy's anxiety, see Mary Wordsworth's letter to her regarding the trip to France (Mary Wordsworth, Letters, 25).

7. See William Wordsworth and Mary Wordsworth, The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).

8. Geoffrey Hartman, "Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth," in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al., 177-216 (New York: Old Seabury Press, 1979).

9. I see the conflicts as more diverse and complicated than does Richard D. McGhee, who argues that Wordsworth tempers romantic passion with classical forms: "'Conversant with Infinity': Form and Meaning in Wordsworth's 'Laodamia,'" Studies in Philology 68 (July 1971): 357-69. Lawrence Lipking's brief discussion of "Laodamia" in Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), is excellent, but in his argument that Wordsworth focuses on Laodamia's fate from a male point of view, Lipking does not see Wordsworth's complicated identification with his character.

10. See Herbert Read, Wordsworth (London: Faber and Faber, n.d.), 149.

11. See Wordsworth's Historical Imagination, 4-6 and passim. Simpson identifies this dynamic conflict working in much of Wordsworth's poetry, but he does not consider the question of gender in the paradigm.

12. Samuel Johnson, "Life of Milton," in Lives of the English Poets, intro. by Arthur Waugh, 2 vols. (1906; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 1:108.

13. Mary Wordsworth, Letters, 23.

14. Heroides and Amores, with Latin text and trans. Grant Showerman, 2d ed., rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977): "hanc specto teneoque sinu pro coniuge vero, / et, tamquam possit verba referre, queror" (lines 157-58).

15. See Iphigenia in Aulis, trans. Charles R. Walker, in Euripides IV, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 224: "Squatting they played at draughts, / Delighting in trickery."

16. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 437-38.

17. See Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 128-50.

18. See the Cornell edition, 151-52, for a full transcription of the revisions in these lines.

19. See Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), for connections between mourning and eroticism in "Adonais" and other elegies. Sacks analyzes Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) in relation to elegiac conventions.

20. Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed, 2:523.

21. See, for instance, Wordsworth's letter to Coleridge (19 April 1808, MY 1:221-23) and the letter to Francis Wrangham (18 January 1816, MY 2:276); see also Isabella Fenwick's notes on The White Doe in PW 3:543.

22. Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed, 2:454-58.

23. See Manning's brilliantly argued "The White Doe ofRylstone, The Convention of Cintra, and the History of a Career," in his Reading Romantics, 165-94. Although I have used the Cornell text, I wrote on the publication history of The White Doe before I had access to Dugas's introduction.

24. Thomas Dunham Whitaker, The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in the County of York, 3d ed. (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1878), 525.

25. For an extended discussion of the cultural implications of embroidery, see Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984; rpt. New York: Routledge, 1989).

26. See Lionel Trilling's discussion of Wordsworthian "wise passiveness" as an activity in "Wordsworth and the Iron Time," in Wordsworth: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. M. H. Abrams (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 65. In Wordsworth's Heroes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), Willard Spiegelman argues that ''the poem concerns types of heroic behavior, one active, the other passive, and refuses to acknowledge the superiority of either" (168). I think that Wordsworth does value the passive as superior, but its association with the feminine complicates the matter.

27. James A. W. Heffernan, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry: The Transforming Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 215. In the introduction to the Cornell edition, Kristine Dugas also accepts the poem as "an idealized account" (5) of suffering and loss; she does not critique Wordsworth's treatment of Emily.

28. Geoffrey Hartman makes this connection in Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 329. Barbara Gates develops the connection between Emily's grief and Wordsworth's grief over the loss of his brother in "Wordsworth's Symbolic Doe: The Power of History in the Mind," Criticism 17 (Summer 1975): 234-45.

29. See Early Years, 539 and following. Beginning with Wordsworth's response to Richard Wordsworth's letter on 11 February 1805, the family correspondence focuses on this tragedy.

30. See, for instance, John Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems, 1797-1807 (1960; rpt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 131-35, and Manning, Reading Romantics, 188-90 and passim.

31. Reed, Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 24.

32. On the topic of 1815 as a time in which the fears and oppositions of the 1790s were intensified, see, again, James K. Chandler's "'Wordsworth' After Waterloo."

33. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990).

34. "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury" (1588), in The Female Spectator: English Women Writers Before 1800, ed. Mary R. Mahl and Helene Koon (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1977), 48. Joan Kelly points out that Elizabeth reinforces the notion that she is "'an exception to the Law of Nature'": "Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes," in Women, History, and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 88.

35. See Jeffrey's negative comment in Romantics Reviewed (2:455), as well as that of Josiah Conder, who dislikes the "mystical elements" (2:370).

36. See, for instance, Sonia Hofkosh, "The Writer's Ravishment: Women and the Romantic Author—The Example of Byron," in R&F, 93-114.

37. Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed, 2:370.

38. John Jones makes this point in The Egotistical Sublime, 154. For an extended discussion of the politics of form and presentation, see Manning, "Tales

and Politics: The Corsair, Lara, and The White Doe of Rylstone," in Reading Romantics, 195-215.

39. See Byron's dedication to Thomas Moore in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, corrected by John Jump (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 277.

40. SeeKelley, Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics, 151-52. My text is the Cornell edition.

41. For a convincing study of the father's tyrannous hold on Matilda, another motherless female character, see Reeve Parker, "Reading Wordsworth's Power: Narrative and Usurpation in The Borderers," ELH 54 (Summer 1987): 299-331: "For all its apparent benevolence and innocence, the relationship has strong if shadowy elements of untoward and tormenting bondage—indeed of punitive tyranny and enslavement to passion" (304). I have argued that Richard Norton's actions place abstract honor over family. Parker sees a similar narrative in The Borderers: "the usurpation of his baronial domains is the emblematic result of abdicating domestic responsibilities (a familiar topos of quest chivalry), abdication that likewise places his family at risk'' (309).

42. Reed, Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 24.

43. See PW 5:227-29 for the canceled narrative.

1. Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), appeared as I was beginning this project. After I completed the manuscript, Mellor's Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), a comprehensive study of what Mellor terms "masculine romanticism" and "feminine romanticism," was published. My notes throughout and my list of secondary sources in the bibliography indicate the range of publications over the past five or six years.

1. Peter Manning, "Wordsworth at St. Bees: Scandals, Sisterhoods, and Wordsworth's Later Poetry," ELH 52 (Spring 1985): 33-58; included in Reading Romantics, 273-99.

1. All of the letters other than those to Jewsbury are from the unpublished collection at the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere. The Jewsbury letters are from Letters of Dora Wordsworth. The first epigraph for this conclusion is taken from LY 2:706n; Wordsworth had asked Hemans to tone down the dedication, which finally read: "To William Wordsworth, Esq., In token of deep respect for his character, and fervent gratitude for moral and intellectual benefit derived from reverential communion with the spirit of his Poetry, this Volume is affectionately inscribed by Felicia Hemans." Passages from Dora Wordsworth's "Journal of a Tour of the Continent 1828" (DCMS 110) are identified by page number. The body of the manuscript is just under one hundred handwritten pages. The letter of 19 April 1838 is particularly difficult to read in parts, because it is written on the front and back of the sheets and is cross-written on both sides.

2. Frederika Beatty, William Wordsworth of Rydal Mount: An Account of the Poet and His Friends in the Last Decade (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1939), 22.

2. Hartley Coleridge, The Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Grace Evelyn Griggs and Earl Leslie Griggs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 196 (21 August 1836).

2. Letters of Dora Wordsworth, 81.

3. I am, of course, borrowing the term "resisting reader" from Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

3. Dora Wordsworth, The Letters of Dora Wordsworth, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Packard, 1944), 45 (1 December 1828). In this volume Vincent has collected the correspondence of Dora Wordsworth to Maria Jane Jewsbury. Other letters written by Dora to which I refer are from the unpublished collection in the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere.

3. In Ambitious Heights, Norma Clarke focuses on the relationship from Jewsbury's point of view and emphasizes the importance of Jewsbury's literary ambitions as distinguishing Jane from Dora (61-68); but I would still argue that Dora's friendship is more than a consolation prize for the young poet who initially wanted a friendship with Wordsworth. Maria Jane Jewsbury was to die of cholera in India on 4 October 1833.

4. John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime: A History of Wordsworth's Imagination (1954; rpt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1960).

4. In Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love—The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle (New York: Routledge, 1990), 61-68, Norma Clarke offers a more astringent reading of Wordsworth's treatment of his "four wives," Mary, Dorothy, Sara, and Dora.

4. Letters of Dora Wordsworth, 84.

5. Helen Darbishire, The Poet Wordsworth (1949; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 27.

5. See Batho, The Later Wordsworth, 90.

5. See the article that initiated the discussion, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-29. Although Smith-Rosenberg confines her argument to nineteenth-century America, many of the conditions, such as the blurring of the roles of mother and daughter, can be found in Britain in general and in the Wordsworth household in particular. Perhaps even more relevant is Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between

Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), especially the chapter on nineteenth-century England entitled ''Kindred Spirits," 157-77.

6. Alice Comparetti, Introduction to The White Doe of Rylstone (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940), 21. See also Edith C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), particularly 106-14.

6. See Moorman 2:527 for a description of the trip.

6. Letters of Dora Wordsworth, 83-85.

7. Don H. Bialostosky, Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 117.

7. R&F, 53. Heinzelman's is a wonderfully suggestive analysis of the idea of labor in the Grasmere years, but the title of the essay, "The Cult of Domesticity: Dorothy and William Wordsworth at Grasmere," is confusing because, according to Heinzelman's definition, the cultic qualities of domesticity arise after the Grasmere years.

7. Wordsworth and Wordsworth, Love Letters, 197-98.

8. References to the two-part Prelude and to later versions of the poem are to the edition by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).

8. In 1826, Wordsworth did purchase a tract adjacent to Rydal Mount that later became known as Dora's Field, in order to forestall his landlady from evicting him. See Moorman 2:421-22.

8. Mellor offers an interesting analysis of Dorothy Wordsworth's decline in Romanticism and Gender, especially 165-68.

9. References here and throughout to "Laodamia" and "A Little Onward ..." are to the edition by Carl H. Ketcham, Shorter Poems, 1807-1820, by William Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

9. Frederika Beatty notes the custom in William Wordsworth of Rydal Mount, 93-94.

9. The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Derek Hudson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 141 (23 March 1835).

10. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 81.

10. See Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, chap. 8, especially 357-70.

10. Beatty, William Wordsworth of Rydal Mount, 97-98.

11. M. Jeanne Peterson, Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

11. Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 3d ed., 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1877), 2:235.

12. Introduction to Letters of Dora Wordsworth, 11. The travel journal is Journal of a Few Months' Residence in Portugal, and Glimpses of the South of Spain, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1847).

13. Hartley Coleridge, Letters, 112 (30 August 1830).

14. John Dryden, "To the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the Two Sister-Arts of Poesie, and Painting, An Ode" (1686 text), in Eighteenth Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson et al. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969), lines 13-15.

15. Geoffrey Hartman, "Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth," 204-5.

16. Barbara Johnson, "Gender and the Yale School," in Speaking of Gender, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Routledge, 1989), 47.

17. This collection was first published as Ecclesiastical Sketches in 1822; it was renamed Ecclesiastical Sketches in a Series of Sonnets in 1832; and the Ecclesiastical Sonnets in Series in 1837. See de Selincourt's note, PW, 3:341.

18. Letters of Dora Wordsworth, 93.

19. See Jeffrey C. Robinson, "A Later Poem by Wordsworth to 'Emma,'" Philological Quarterly 64 (Summer 1985): 411.

20. Quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975), 173.

21. Bradford Keyes Mudge's admirable book, Sara Coleridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), certainly reveals the tensions Sara Coleridge experienced in trying to make this fit.

22. For a discussion of Wordsworth's contributions to annuals and anthologies, see N. Stephen Bauer, "Wordsworth and the Early Anthologies," The Library 27 (March 1972): 37-45. I am grateful to Richard Sha for this reference.

23. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 34.

24. See also Mellor's brief but incisive interpretation of this ship in terms of gender in Romanticism and Gender, 168-69.

25. Carol T. Christ, "The Feminine Subject in Victorian Poetry," ELH 54 (Summer 1987): 395.

26. For such readings see, for instance, Margaret Homans's Bearing the Word, 120, 126, and Marlon Ross's "Naturalizing Gender: Woman's Place in Wordsworth's Ideological Landscape," ELH 53 (Summer 1986): especially 392-96.

27. Anne K. Mellor allowed me to read her paper in progress, "Felicia Hemans, Domestic Ideology, and the Graves of a Household," which helped me think about Hemans and domesticity. She has now elaborated these ideas in Romanticism and Gender, 123-43.

28. The Poetical Works of Felicia Hemans, ed. William M. Rossetti (London: Ward Lock and Co., 1878).

29. See Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 200.

30. Edith C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth, says that "It would seem that he knew the Poems by Two Brothers of 1826, possibly also Timbuctoo of 1829 and the Poems of 1830" (33).

31. Judith Newton, "Making—and Remaking—History: Another Look at Patriarchy," in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock, 124-40 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

32. On the greater emphasis on formality and ceremony in Wordsworth's later poetry, see Jones, The Egotistical Sublime, especially chap. 4, as well as Manning's "Wordsworth at St. Bees."

33. William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956).

1. Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), appeared as I was beginning this project. After I completed the manuscript, Mellor's Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), a comprehensive study of what Mellor terms "masculine romanticism" and "feminine romanticism," was published. My notes throughout and my list of secondary sources in the bibliography indicate the range of publications over the past five or six years.

1. Peter Manning, "Wordsworth at St. Bees: Scandals, Sisterhoods, and Wordsworth's Later Poetry," ELH 52 (Spring 1985): 33-58; included in Reading Romantics, 273-99.

1. All of the letters other than those to Jewsbury are from the unpublished collection at the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere. The Jewsbury letters are from Letters of Dora Wordsworth. The first epigraph for this conclusion is taken from LY 2:706n; Wordsworth had asked Hemans to tone down the dedication, which finally read: "To William Wordsworth, Esq., In token of deep respect for his character, and fervent gratitude for moral and intellectual benefit derived from reverential communion with the spirit of his Poetry, this Volume is affectionately inscribed by Felicia Hemans." Passages from Dora Wordsworth's "Journal of a Tour of the Continent 1828" (DCMS 110) are identified by page number. The body of the manuscript is just under one hundred handwritten pages. The letter of 19 April 1838 is particularly difficult to read in parts, because it is written on the front and back of the sheets and is cross-written on both sides.

2. Frederika Beatty, William Wordsworth of Rydal Mount: An Account of the Poet and His Friends in the Last Decade (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1939), 22.

2. Hartley Coleridge, The Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Grace Evelyn Griggs and Earl Leslie Griggs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 196 (21 August 1836).

2. Letters of Dora Wordsworth, 81.

3. I am, of course, borrowing the term "resisting reader" from Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

3. Dora Wordsworth, The Letters of Dora Wordsworth, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Packard, 1944), 45 (1 December 1828). In this volume Vincent has collected the correspondence of Dora Wordsworth to Maria Jane Jewsbury. Other letters written by Dora to which I refer are from the unpublished collection in the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere.

3. In Ambitious Heights, Norma Clarke focuses on the relationship from Jewsbury's point of view and emphasizes the importance of Jewsbury's literary ambitions as distinguishing Jane from Dora (61-68); but I would still argue that Dora's friendship is more than a consolation prize for the young poet who initially wanted a friendship with Wordsworth. Maria Jane Jewsbury was to die of cholera in India on 4 October 1833.

4. John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime: A History of Wordsworth's Imagination (1954; rpt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1960).

4. In Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love—The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle (New York: Routledge, 1990), 61-68, Norma Clarke offers a more astringent reading of Wordsworth's treatment of his "four wives," Mary, Dorothy, Sara, and Dora.

4. Letters of Dora Wordsworth, 84.

5. Helen Darbishire, The Poet Wordsworth (1949; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 27.

5. See Batho, The Later Wordsworth, 90.

5. See the article that initiated the discussion, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-29. Although Smith-Rosenberg confines her argument to nineteenth-century America, many of the conditions, such as the blurring of the roles of mother and daughter, can be found in Britain in general and in the Wordsworth household in particular. Perhaps even more relevant is Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between

Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), especially the chapter on nineteenth-century England entitled ''Kindred Spirits," 157-77.

6. Alice Comparetti, Introduction to The White Doe of Rylstone (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940), 21. See also Edith C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), particularly 106-14.

6. See Moorman 2:527 for a description of the trip.

6. Letters of Dora Wordsworth, 83-85.

7. Don H. Bialostosky, Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 117.

7. R&F, 53. Heinzelman's is a wonderfully suggestive analysis of the idea of labor in the Grasmere years, but the title of the essay, "The Cult of Domesticity: Dorothy and William Wordsworth at Grasmere," is confusing because, according to Heinzelman's definition, the cultic qualities of domesticity arise after the Grasmere years.

7. Wordsworth and Wordsworth, Love Letters, 197-98.

8. References to the two-part Prelude and to later versions of the poem are to the edition by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).

8. In 1826, Wordsworth did purchase a tract adjacent to Rydal Mount that later became known as Dora's Field, in order to forestall his landlady from evicting him. See Moorman 2:421-22.

8. Mellor offers an interesting analysis of Dorothy Wordsworth's decline in Romanticism and Gender, especially 165-68.

9. References here and throughout to "Laodamia" and "A Little Onward ..." are to the edition by Carl H. Ketcham, Shorter Poems, 1807-1820, by William Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

9. Frederika Beatty notes the custom in William Wordsworth of Rydal Mount, 93-94.

9. The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Derek Hudson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 141 (23 March 1835).

10. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 81.

10. See Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, chap. 8, especially 357-70.

10. Beatty, William Wordsworth of Rydal Mount, 97-98.

11. M. Jeanne Peterson, Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

11. Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 3d ed., 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1877), 2:235.