Sibling Conversations: The Wordsworthian Construction of Authorship

Abstract

Lucy Newlyn argues in Reading, Writing, and Romanticism (2000) that anxiety of authorship was more complicated when a woman with literary ambition was intimately associated with a more established male writer — she had to enter a ‘terrain’ that, ‘both professionally and privately’, had already been dominated by him (p. 226). I believe that Dorothy diffuses this anxiety by imaginatively ‘setting [her]self up’ as co-author of William’s work, a playing into the very source of her self-conflict, the resultant tensions of which become progressively apparent.