Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship by Nicola Healey (review)

Nicola Healey’s first monograph joins a burgeoning field of twenty-first century re-evaluations of Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge and, by extension, the marginalised Romantic writer. This study grows out of Susan M. Levin’s 2009 edition of Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings, Lisa McGee’s collection of Hartley’s poetry (2000), and recent studies by the likes of Kenneth Cervelli (2007), Andrew Keanie (2008) and Daisy Hay (2010).

Healey’s success in beginning to draw Dorothy and Hartley onto an equal level with their fellow Romantics is indicated by her careful choice of names: the primary subjects in this study are, with the exception of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (STC), referred to by their first names. Healey thus avoids the tensions arising from the assumptions created by those loaded Romantic surnames, Coleridge and Wordsworth. She notes how Hartley and Dorothy’s reputations have unjustly suffered because of their already famous surnames:

[…] the literary worth of both Hartley and Dorothy was recognized from their first publication: they have been consistently valued as original and great writers but, ironically, the familial connection that is so significant to the construction of their relational poetics has also been the cause of their subsequent neglect and misrepresentation.

Although Healey’s primary aim is to acknowledge and interrogate these ‘familial connections’, this study reveals its main achievement in the ‘construction of relational poetics’ which link Hartley and Dorothy to writers outside their immediate circle. Healey thus begins the process of situating both of these writers within a wider canonical tradition, a necessary part of making the case for including their works in increasing numbers of nineteenth-century studies. Hartley is situated alongside the younger generation of Romantics, notably Byron and Keats, and Healey also suggests that his work anticipated that of the likes of George Eliot. Dorothy, meanwhile, is set up as a forerunner to Ruskin, Monet and Lawrence in particular. By beginning to free Hartley and Dorothy from familial readings, and by drawing explicit comparisons to the wider artistic canon, Healey is able to establish the relevance of study of their works in terms of a much broader academic tradition.

The study is split into two halves: the first three chapters examine Hartley’s ‘poetics of relationship’, whilst the final three explore Dorothy’s construction of herself as a writer in the context of her family circle. Healey suggests that, for Hartley, ‘loss of relationship leads to loss of self”. Healey nevertheless avoids the conventional suggestion that Hartley was ‘wasted or unfulfilled’ in part because of estrangement from his father; instead, she suggests that these familial difficulties could inspire his poetry, as much as they damaged his real sense of self. She argues that Hartley’s memory was crucial to maintaining relationships. Healey identifies water imagery as being a key metaphor through which Hartley interrogated the cohesiveness of his relationship networks; that such imagery is derived from poems like STC’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ strengthens such reflections upon the poetics of relationships and, specifically, inheritance. Here, Healey expands upon Andrew Keanie’s suggestion that Hartley was primarily concerned with the miniature; unlike STC, Hartley is concerned with one drop of water rather than an entire ocean. Healey’s reading implies that Hartley anticipated Bloom’s poetic theory: ‘[i]t is Hartley’s resolute belief in this necessary interdependence, combined with his acute sensitivity […] which fuels his endeavour to monumentalize all creation, from the minute […] to the literary giants, Homer and Shakespeare’. Hartley’s poetry implied the importance of the trivial, as well as the monumental; it thereby implied the importance of the marginalised writer alongside the canonical.

Hartley seems to anticipate Virginia Woolf’s ironic suggestion that an ‘important’ book deals with men at war, as opposed to an examination of women in the drawing room. Indeed, Healey suggests that ‘Hartley’s poetic voice identifies with meek, hidden, unappropriated female identity’; she frames her readings in this...