Title: Becoming Wordsworthian
First published: 1995
Description: This innovative book explores the hypothesis that "Wordsworth the Poet" is an imaginative projection in which both William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy collaborated, developing a persona that the siblings strove to inhabit. Because William was its principal enactor, both publicly and privately, poetically and experientially, his tendency was to sublimate Dorothy into an audible but invisible muse, located just behind him.

Dorothy, however, always imagined herself in a collaborative or twinned relation to William, even when he was absent. She experienced the Wordsworthian role as increasingly alienating, more an aesthetic performance to be enacted at will, whereas William found the role ever more natural and inseparable from himself.

. This book explores the ways in which the Wordsworths were particularly suited to develop their collaborative persona, the literary fictions they drew on, and the value they derived from such a concerted and utopian effort. The author bases her work on well-known Wordsworthian texts, as well as little-read lyrics and essays of William and the comparatively unknown oeuvre of Dorothy.
Subjects: Aesthetics, Aesthetics, British, Authorship, British Aesthetics, Brothers and sisters, Collaboration, English Poets, Family relationships, History, Masculinity in literature, Poetry, Poets, English, Self in literature, Sex differences, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Wordsworth, william, 1770-1850, Wordsworth, dorothy, 1771-1855, Great britain, history, 19th century, Poetry, authorship, Authorship, sex differences
Places: England
People: Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855), William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PR5892.A34 F39 1995