Product Description

William Wordsworth's early life reads like a novel. Orphaned at a young age and dependent on the charity of unsympathetic relatives, he became the archetypal teenage rebel. Refusing to enter the Church, he went instead to Revolutionary France, where he fathered an illegitimate daughter and became a committed Republican. His poetry was as revolutionary as his politics, challenging convention in form, style, and subject, and earning him the universal derision and contempt of critics. Only the unfailing encouragement of a tightly knit group of supporters, his family, and, above all, Coleridge kept him true to his poetic vocation. In the half-century that followed his reputation was transformed. His advocacy of the importance of imagination and feeling touched a chord in an increasingly industrial, mechanistic age, and his influence was profoundly and widely felt in every sphere of life. In the last decade of his life, Rydal Mount, his home for thirty-seven years, became a place of pilgrimage, not just for the great and powerful in Church and state, but also, more touchingly, for the hundreds of ordinary people who came to pay their respects to his genius. In what is, astonishingly, the first biography of Wordsworth to treat the latter part of his life as fully as the first, Juliet Barker balances meticulous research with a readable style, and scrupulous objectivity with an understanding of her subject. She reveals not only the public figure who was courted and reviled in equal measure but also the complex, elusive, private man behind that image. Drawing on unpublished sources, she vividly re-creates the intimacy of Wordsworth's domestic circle, showing the love, laughter, loyalty, and tragedies that bound them together. Far from being the remote, cold, solitary figure of legend, Wordsworth emerges from his biography as a passionate, vibrant man who lived for his family, his poetry, and his beloved Lakeland. His legacy, as a poet and as the spiritual founder of the conservation movement, remains with us today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #934924 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .2 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 548 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Wordsworth was a large-boned, somewhat shambling, brilliant and big-nosed man, and Juliet Barker has written a biography to match him on every one of these points. Like its subject it is huge, nearly a thousand pages, and it contains multitudes of fascinating facts--a biographer can hardly go wrong with a subject who lived through such interesting times and knew such interesting people: revolutionary France (where Wordsworth travelled and fathered an illegitimate child), the Napoleonic wars, Coleridge, Southey, and writing a series of astonishing poems. Barker's easy style draws on an enormous wealth of research, but is never bogged down by it, and she manages to make her sometimes obstinate subject always human and likeable. This is an especial achievement in the later years, when Wordsworth's politics calcified into hang 'em and flog 'em Toryism; Barker manages to make even this grumpy old poet a figure you care about. The passages at the end of the book when Wordsworth's daughter Dora dies of tuberculosis, are genuinely moving. It is not a perfect book; like its subject, too it is a little dull. Its readings of the poetry itself (and the poetry is the reason why Wordsworth is so important, after all) are a little meagre; Barker limits herself to observations along the lines of "this is a great poem", "this is an important poem", "this sonnet is an exquisite work of art" and the like. Of the "Intimations Ode" ("the greatest William ever wrote") she limits herself to observing that, so familiar is it nowadays, "reading it is like going through a dictionary of quotations". Steven Gill's William Wordsworth, which has been the standard biography hitherto, does the job of critical reading of the verse much better. And like its subject Barker's book is big-nosed too, in several senses. For one thing, it traces the Wordsworthian "Roman" profile from father to children; Dora had a portrait painted of herself "with swept back black hair and large nose", and later travelled to the artist's London studio "to have my nose reduced a little". But Barker also sniffs haughtily at some of the modern attitudes to Wordsworth's life and times. To the notorious suggestion that Wordsworth had an incestuous relationship with his sister Dorothy, Barker snorts that people only think so because they view the couple "through Freud's distorting lens", and dismisses the--let's be honest, intriguing--notion as "prurient speculation". This said, however, this is nevertheless a noble biographical exercise, absorbing and solid. --Adam Roberts

From Publishers Weekly
Following Wordsworth over the course of his eight decades (1770–1850), Barker, unlike other biographers, gives equal attention to his early poetic career and radicalism, and to his "middle-aged Toryism" and later domestic years. As she did in The Brontës, Barker puts her subject in the context of his family: his early orphaning; his deep bond with his equally sensitive sister, Dorothy; and the tragic early deaths of his children. Apart from Wordsworth's enjoyment of the Lake District's inspiring landscape, he had a somewhat Dickensian upbringing among tightfisted relatives. Wordsworth's intelligence won him a place at Cambridge, which was intended to position him for the clergy, but his poetic calling and radicalization during the French Revolution determined otherwise. The English political circles in which the young Wordsworth moved introduced him to Coleridge, whose early inspiring friendship eventually deteriorated as the two poets' creative paths split (Barker underscores Coleridge's exasperating character). She is far more forgiving of Wordsworth's abandonment of his early ideology, sympathizing with his practical need as a family man to take a government job enforcing the press-restricting Stamp Act until he received a civil pension—and ultimately the laureateship. Although the U.S. version has been abridged slightly from the British edition, it amply displays Barker's painstaking scholarship. (Dec.)
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Review
“A marvelously readable narrative . . . a model of how such things should be done -- a tremendous achievement.” (Michael Holroyd, Mail on Sunday )

“Uncommonly entertaining.” (The Spectator )