Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women

Focusing on the poems of Wordsworth’s Great Decade, feminist critics have tended to see Wordsworth as an exploiter of women and feminine perspectives. In this original work, Judith Page examines works from throughout Wordsworth’s long career to offer a more nuanced feminist account of the poet’s values. She asks questions about Wordsworth and women from the point of view of the women themselves and of 18th- and 19th-century culture. Making extensive use of family letters, journals and other documents, as well as unpublished material by the poet’s daughter Dora Wordsworth, Page presents Wordsworth as a poet not defined primarily by egotistical sublimity but by his complicated and conflicted endorsement of domesticity and familial life.