Abstract
From the Lambs to the Sitwells, the late eighteenth to the twentieth century produced a succession of literary families whose collaborative relationships generated poems, novels, journals, letters, legends, mysteries, and speculative psychoanalytical responses. The most common configuration of these family groups was the brother-sister pair or trio: hence Henry and Sarah Fielding, Charles and Mary Lamb, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Dante Gabriel, Christina and William Rossetti, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, and in the United States, Gertrude and Leo Stein, and William, Henry and Alice James. Sister-sister pairs, by contrast, are rare — unless one breaks down the Brontë group, or looks at minor writers such as Maria and Geraldine Jewsbury; brother-brother equally so, unless one separates the Rossettis, or looks to Germany for the Brothers Grimm. In most cases, there was something about the interaction of the sexes that was more fruitful of literary achievement than the same-sex partnership.
Now reader, how were those two connected? they were not lovers — they were not man & wife — they must have been, a marked resemblance in their features attested it, brother & sister — 1
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Notes
Charlotte Brontë, ‘Captain Henry Hastings’, Five Novelettes, ed. Winifred Gérin (London: Folio Press, 1971), p. 201.
Molly Lefebure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (London: Victor Gollancz: 1974), p. 343.
Charles Lamb to Dorothy Wordsworth, 14 June 1805, in The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), II, 169.
Charles Lamb, ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’, The Essays of Elia (1823) (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), p. 44.
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787–1805, ed. Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 98
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–72)
De Quincey quoted in Kathleen Jones, A Passionate Sisterhood: The sisters, wives and daughters of the Lake Poets (London: Virago, 1998), p. 115.
Alan Grob, ‘William and Dorothy: A Case Study in the Hermeneutics of Disparagement’, ELH 65 (1998), 217.
Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975), in Feminisms: an anthology of literary theory and criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, revised edition (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1997), p. 356.
Alison Hickey, ‘Double Bonds: Charles Lamb’s Romantic Collaborations,’ ELH 63 (1996), p. 761.
Jane Aaron, A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 180.
Charles and Mary Lamb, Mrs Leicester’s School (1808 repr. London: J. M. Dent, 1899), p. 93
James Soderholm, ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’s Return to Tin tern Abbey’, New Literary History 26 (1995), 309–22.
John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 162.
These cancelled lines of ‘Nutting’ are reproduced in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), vol. II, pp. 504–5.
Gregory Jones, ‘”Rude Intercourse”: Uncensoring Wordsworth’s “Nutting”’, Studies in Romanticism 35 (Summer 1996), pp. 238–9.
Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal, 13 March 1802, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols (London: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1952), I, 123.
Douglass H. Thomson, ‘Wordsworth’s Lucy of “Nutting”,’ Studies in Romanticism 18 (Summer 1979), p. 287.
Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 652.
Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Prometheus Books, 1983), p. 2.
An Edition of The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Christine Alexander (Shakespeare Head Press: Basil Blackwell, 1987), I, 25.
Winifred Gerin, Branwell Bronte (London: Thomas Nelson, 1961), p. 71.
Charlotte Brontë, Five Novelettes, ed. Winifred Gerin (London: Folio Press, 1971), pp. 201
Tom Winnifrith, The Life of Patrick Branwell Brontë’, Brontë Society Transactions 24 (April 1999), p. 2.
Jane Miller, Women Writing About Men (London: Virago, 1986), pp. 77
The Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë, ed. Tom Winnifrith (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press/Basil Blackwell, 1983) pp. 30
U. C. Knoepflmacher, Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (Landmarks of World Literature series, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 102.
His best-known portraits of her are in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’ (1849) and ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ (1850); the caricature was drawn in response to a Times reviewer who commented of her Goblin Market volume (1862): ‘Miss Rossetti can point to work which could not easily be mended.’ See William Michael Rossetti’s ‘Memoir’ of his sister, in The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed William Michael Rossetti (London: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1928), p. lxiii.
Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (1994; London: Pimlico, 1995), p. 326.
The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. with Preface by William M. Rossetti (London: Ellis & Elvey, 1898), p. xxi
Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 120.
The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. W. M. Rossetti (1908; New York: Haskell House, 1968), p. 87.
Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London: Viking, 1995), p. 379.
Dolores Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), pp. 146–7.
Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley, 3 August 1917, Letters of Aldous Huxley ed. Grover Smith (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 132.
Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1931), p. 488.
Virginia Woolf to Jacques Raverat, 30 July 1923, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 60.
F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), p. 73.
Edith Sitwell to Rache Lovat Dickson, 14 July 1949, Edith Sitwell: Selected Letters, ed. John Lehmann and Derek Parker (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1970), p. 168.
Osbert Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand (London: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1945), p. 160.
Edith Sitwell, English Women (London: William Collins, 1942).
Sacheverell Sitwell: A Symposium, ed. Derek Parker (London: Bertram Rota, 1975), p. 5.
Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 60.
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© 2002 Valerie Sanders
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Sanders, V. (2002). Brother-Sister Collaborative Relationships. In: The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513211_3
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