‘The common life which is the real life’: Family Authorship and Identity

Abstract

Dorothy Wordsworth’s poetic development, like Hartley Coleridge’s, shows her finding ‘In weakness strength’ (CPW, p. 117, ll. 13–14). Susan Wolfson remarks with regard to Dorothy’s ‘Floating Island’ poem that Dorothy ‘avoids elegy by blending the passing of her vision into a suggestion that what has passed away from one may be renewed by others: the isle is not so much lost as invisible’ (Mellor, 1988, p. 145). Wolfson’s argument is that a relational selfhood, with its faith in the continuity and regeneration of self through others, is ultimately a stronger representation of identity than William Wordsworth’s more egocentric manifestation. This belief parallels, as we have seen, Hartley’s understanding of poetic identity. Moreover, it anticipates Virginia Woolf’s notion that the potential of the unappreciated poet lives on through the latent promise of later generations; and, importantly, that our human identity should be perceived, as Woolf states in A Room of One’s Own, ‘not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves’, a reality which lies not in the ‘little separate lives which we live as individuals’ but only through awareness of the ‘common life’ — ‘the real life’ (Woolf, 1998, pp. 149, 148).