Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility

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Preface The chapters in this volume are developed from lectures given at the Wordsworth Summer Conference and Winter School in 2007 and 2008. The talks were not initially conceived as a series, and the three chapters might have appeared in any order. It would have made sense to begin with Helen Maria Williams’s earliest influence on William Wordsworth, then look in detail at the relationship between their accounts of the French Revolution, and close by glancing at the damage done to his critical reputation by his liaison dangereux with feminine sensibility as demonstrated in Poems in Two Volumes. Or I could have opened with the celebrated matter of Jeffrey’s handling of both Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes and then considered what it was in Wordsworth’s poetic allegiances that tempted him to betray so much ‘feminine’ sensibility in his ‘Pansies’ as one might call them, and why the impact of so much sensibility had the effect of thrusting the admitted ‘manliness’ of the political sonnets into the background. It seemed, on balance, best to open with the grand historical topos of ‘human nature seeming born again’, as encountered first by a female historian and then a male poet; to go on by examining other traces of the former’s work and sensibility to be found in the latter; and to conclude (with what was, in fact the first lecture) by wondering whether it was these traces of ‘feminine’ sensibility, or ‘effeminacy’, by the standards of the day, that drew down upon one hapless lake poet the scorn of Edinburgh. Complete reconstruction of the approach in the first two chapters proved to be beyond my skill, so the chapters do treat some elements of the story of Wordsworth and Williams, especially as regards their experience of France, twice over, though with different emphases. The package is, to my mind, held together by this matter of (as I would have it) ungendered poetic sensibility. Apart from anything
Wordsworth and Sensibility 9 of value that I might be found to be saying about Wordsworth and Williams, or indeed Wordsworth and Jeffrey, the one thing I would most like to register is the wrongness of Coleridge’s famous assertion that Wordsworth’s personality was entirely masculine—that there was nothing feminine in his nature. Parts of chapter 1 are making their fourth appearance. A version of it was published in The Wordsworth Circle, 40:1 (Winter 2009), and in it I drew on an article first published in 1989, in the French Revolution volume of the Yearbook of English Studies, edited by J. R. Watson, which Stephen Gill has also seen fit to resurrect in his Oxford ‘Casebooks in Criticism’ collection on The Prelude (2006). But I have avoided the temptation to draw too much upon a relevant chapter on ‘“The Milder day”: or, Manliness and Minstrelsy’ in Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation (2003).
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Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility

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