Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women

Both Romanticists and feminists will welcome this original focus on Wordsworth's shifting attitude to gender, as well as the detailed and genuinely fresh reading of specific poems that it produces. This is the first full-length study to consider the role of the domestic in Wordsworth's poetry as well as the first to recognize the all-important role played in his later poetry by his relationship with his daughter Dora. It is an extremely important contribution to Wordsworth studies which challenges all the received wisdom concerning Wordsworth's poetic development and the role of gender in his writing.—Anne K. Mellor, author of Romanticism and Gender An original contribution to romantic studies and one whose publication is most welcome. Its central thesis—that Wordsworth's relationships to the numerous women in his life are of crucial importance to the understanding of his poetry and politics—extends the concerns of earlier commentators in new and thoughtful ways. Steering a careful and compelling middle course between the apologists and the prosecutors, Page reconstructs Wordsworth's conflicted relationship to passion—sexual, political, and familial—as that relationship evolves over his long career.—Bradford K. Mudge, author of Sara Coleridge: A Victorian Daughter