A Passionate Sisterhood – Kathleen Jones

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey have become such a literary myth that we are used to looking at the Lake District solely through their eyes.

But the story for the women who loved and surrounded them – Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth, Sarah Coleridge and their daughters – was very different. Based on necessity, the extended family-type group they formed was a far cry from the harmonious rustic idyll illustrated by their male counterparts. Kathleen Jones looks at their letters and journals in this illuminating account of their lives – the passionate attachments and jealousies, unwanted pregnancies and children’s death, drug addiction and barbaric medical practices.

In this group biography of the women who featured in the lives of the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, Kathleen Jones takes us into the kitchens, sickrooms, and eventually the madwoman’s attics of these major Romantic households. The image of the familiar rustic idyll of Romantic poetry depends upon the bracing way these women bore the brunt of domestic realities. Their letters and journals form the basis for an illuminating new account of their interconnected lives–their passionate attachments, jealousies, the deaths of children, the realities of chronic ill health–at the same time contributing to our understanding of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey as all-too-fallible human beings.