A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives, and Daughters of the Lake Poets, and: Eve's Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France, and: Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel (review)

A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives, and Daughters of the Lake Poets by Kathleen Jones. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, 313 pp., $29.95 hardcover.

Eve's Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France by Whitney Walton. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 2000, 308 pp., $49.95 hardcover.

Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel by Hugh Small. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, 221 pp., $35.00 hardcover.

Kathleen Jones has written a group biography of the sisters, wives, and daughters of the Lake poets in England in the first half of the nineteenth century. In her relentless excavation of the facts, Jones builds a case for admiration, pity, and outrage on behalf of the women of the Wordsworth circle. Even better, Jones provides the reader with a supportive understanding of life as they lived it. Here are the mundane roots of Romanticism.

The fortunes of the Fricker sisters, Sarah, Mary, and Edith, began brightly. All were educated above the standards of the day and were brought up in liberal, Unitarian surroundings. Sarah married Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Mary married Robert Lovell, disinherited son of a wealthy Quaker; and Edith married Robert Southey, writer, critic, and poet laureate. Coleridge and Southey were much taken with the republicanism of the French Revolution and the women had apparently read Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. The men speculatively talked of leaving England and forming a community of self-governing equals, an idea known then as Pantisocracy. Though it was to be a totally democratic society, their views on the role of women were sketchy and their ideas of domestic work unrealistic, quite possibly because the women were not consulted. The couples remained in England, and their lives became intertwined with those of William Wordsworth and the second sorority portrayed in the book.

This group consisted of two sisters and a sister-in-law: Mary Hutchinson, who married Wordsworth; Sara Hutchinson, with whom Coleridge became infatuated; and Dorothy, Wordsworth's sister. Dorothy's character was predicated on serving others. Dorothy's mother died when the family was young and the children were split up. When she was finally reunited with her brother William, they became passionately attached; she was his amanuensis and his best critic. The frequent use he made of her notebooks makes it fair to consider her vivid observations as the springboard for much of his poetic imagination. Though he denied her contribution and edited her out of his later poems, scholars have since recognized her literary gifts. Dorothy also played the role of intelligent, feminine admirer to Coleridge and, for a time, the three formed an intensely romantic, triangular friendship. When Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, the circle expanded with emotional consequences to Dorothy still not fully fathomable. Meanwhile, Sarah Coleridge, who was not literary, but nevertheless invented her own language, valiantly coped with her mercurial, mostly absent husband, childbearing, meager resources, and illness. She had expected a more equal partnership. Jones's treatment of her subverts the conventional portrait of the unsympathetic wife of a misunderstood genius. Edith bore Robert Southey eight children, lost four to early deaths, and subsided into depression and eventual madness. Mary Lovell's husband died, leaving her in her mid-twenties, with a son, no occupation, and no means of support. Southey extended assistance to both Sarah and Mary, and for a long time Southey's Greta Hall was filled with several dependent families.

Three daughters, childhood friends, constituted the third group: Sara Coleridge, Dorothy (Dora) Wordsworth, and Edith May Southey. Edith May married a respected clergyman...