Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth – serie

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

This new edition of The Later Years contains over six hundred letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth that have never been published before, and many more that have appeared only in fragmentary or incorrect form. It follows Wordsworth through the troubled years of early Victorian England, provides indispensable material for understanding the later phases of his career, while also offering innumerable insights into the great poems of his prime. Many hitherto unpublished letters reveal his pervasive influence as the poet of Man, Nature, and Society, who was acclaimed in his later years as the first of the great Victorian sages. Others illustrate his life in the Lake District and London, his last literary projects (including the publication of Guilt and Sorrow and The Borderers), and his contacts with a new generation of writers, artists, churchmen, and men of affairs, from both Britain and America. Above all, his correspondence bears witness to his lifelong commitment to poetry. For Dorothy Wordsworth, however, these were years of physical decline and near-silence, and the poet's letters provide a moving record of his struggles to come to terms with the problems and cares that afflicted his immediate family circle.

This volume prints more than 150 letters, most of them previously unpublished, which appeared too late for inclusion in the second edition of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1967-88): they are indispensable for understanding the poet and the inner dynamics of the Wordsworth circle. Of outstanding interest are the unexpectedly tender and fervent letters which Wordsworth wrote to his wife Mary during brief periods of separation in 1810 and 1812: others provide fresh evidence about his contacts with Annette Vallon and his `French' daughter Caroline long after his withdrawal from revolutionary politics in France, and indeed up to the end of his life. Further letters illustrate the poet's literary and personal relations with Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Charles Lamb; his changing political and social views; his life in the Lake District and London; and, above all, his lifelong commitment to poetry and the principles that guided his imaginative life. These letters, varied in tone and subject-matter, will do much to dispel the ideal that he was invariably a reluctant or reserved correspondent.Dorothy Wordsworth, by contrast, fills out all the details of domestic life which her brother thought it unnecessary to dwell on, and her letters add their own characteristic touches to the picture of the Wordsworth circle - until the final breakdown of her health.

This book is intended for students of English literature and history; general readers; visitors to the Lake District.