I'd like a cottage with broad beans and a poet
Dove Cottage, Dorothy Wordsworth, and the homemaking of early 20thc women artists
On a rainy day during her holiday in the Lake District in 1920, the painter Carrington read Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. She wrote to her partner, writer Lytton Strachey:
Sometimes it is intimate and exciting. ‘William read “Peter Bell” in the orchard,’ ‘William wrote late and read me “The Rainbow” before retiring’, imagine it! What days they must have spent together, & those moonlight walks by the Lake! I am glad I now know her bedroom, I have even seen her washstand, & the old cracked yellow jug & basin, and the little seat of stones that they built near Rydal where William used to compose his poetry. Yet I have had a Poet read me his poetry! I thought in many ways it was like our life. And I loved them both so much, for the way they sowed Broad Beans and she darned socks & he read Shakespeare to her.
Carrington had visited Dove Cottage in Grasmere, cradle of the ‘golden decade’ (1799-1808) enjoyed by Dorothy, her poet brother William and their Romantic circle, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. At six years old, Dorothy was separated from her siblings after her mother’s death and raised amidst various relatives. Orphaned completely in 1783, William and Dorothy were only permanently reunited in 1795 after receiving an inheritance bequest. They lived briefly in Dorset and Somerset, where they met Coleridge (leading to Lyrical Ballads (1798)), before settling at Dove Cottage.
Due to these unsettled years, the idea of home and homemaking was dear to Dorothy. She envisaged her future life in detail as early as 1793:
I have laid the particular scheme of happiness for each Season. When I think of Winter I hasten to furnish our little Parlour. I close the Shutters, set out the Tea-table, brighten the Fire. When our Refreshment is ended I produce our Work, and William brings his book to our Table and contributes at once to our Instruction and amusement, and at Intervals we lay aside the Book and each hazard our observations upon what has been read without the fear of Ridicule or Censure.
Published in a substantially edited edition in 1897, Dorothy’s journals mingle poetical observations and nature-worship with everyday tasks: mending, collecting the post, or ‘sticking’ the peas in the kitchen garden. Some of her entries provided direct inspiration for Wordsworth’s poems. We come to know the physicality of the family, their headaches and fatigues. Dorothy does not often describe her feelings directly. Like a novel, her social interactions and perceptions of nature create their own emotional rhythm. Chattering birds, the movement of water, or the effect of moonlight on the fells are infused with Dorothy’s subjectivity.
When Carrington compared ‘our life’ to the Wordsworths, she was referring to Tidmarsh Mill in Berkshire, where she and Lytton Strachey first set up home together between 1918 and 1924. It was a place where Carrington could paint, Strachey could write his playfully deflating biographies of Victorian worthies, and both could entertain their friends and lovers. A prize-winning Slade art student, one of the first ‘cropheads’ to shear off their long hair and occasionally wear trousers, Carrington fell in love with the primarily homosexual Strachey after making contact with the now famous Bloomsbury group in 1915. In This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century (2021), art historian Rebecca Birrell describes Tidmarsh as a form of queer homemaking. She writes of their unconventional relationship:
Like the bond between children and nursemaids, theirs was loving and preoccupying, playful and pedagogical, physical but unsexual, qualities which were condensed in Carrington’s summing-up of their most treasured memories together in 1918. She recalls Lytton scrambling in the garden amongst the weeds, observing him as he reclined in the bath, lying on his bed as he napped, and coming close to him to smell his hair. Tender and tactile, Carrington’s precious images are closer to the memories of siblings than lovers. Partly this was Carrington hoping for an intimacy that endured, unconditional in the way a blood bond can feel, but it was as much about the mood that was created in their new home. Tidmarsh offered its inhabitants a passage back to their childhood, and Carrington for one was determined to make right its disappointments. For those ‘communal breakers of the law’, all of whom had experienced some form of oppression or isolation as children, Tidmarsh was an answering kindness.
At Tidmarsh, Carrington painted alongside gardening, decorating and cooking. She supplemented her income by sign-painting for local businesses. Perhaps unlike many of her Bloomsbury peers, such as writer Virginia Woolf and her painter sister Vanessa Bell, Carrington seems more authentically interested in (and more able to relate to) the lives of working class people. In this, she shares another affinity with Dorothy Wordsworth, who frequently wrote down the stories of the displaced and less well off that she met in Cumbria. One of Carrington’s most compelling paintings is a portrait of Mrs Box, a Cornish woman whose farm she stayed on several times, showing a resolute face set deep within the magnificent daffodil-like pleats of her white cap.
Born to a middle-class family with links to colonial service in India, Carrington’s suburban upbringing attracted comment from Bloomsburyites with more ‘high-cultured’ intelligentsia backgrounds. As Birrell points out, Bloomsbury did engage critically with class and Empire, chafing at the hypocrisies of respectability. Yet they mostly remained attached to their petty snobberies and aristocratic hobnobbing. Their households, including Tidmarsh, were run with the labour of domestic servants.
The Bloomsbury group’s origin story was Woolf and Bell’s move from their stuffy Kensington childhood home to Gordon Square in 1904, following the death of their emotionally tyrannical father Leslie Stephen. First editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, avid mountaineer in his youth, Stephen was very much an ‘Eminent Victorian’ of the strain that Strachey would satirise.
Now orphans like Dorothy and William, Woolf and Bell could slough off the demands of society and devote themselves to writing and painting in ‘unfashionable’ Bloomsbury. They came to know their brother Thoby’s Cambridge friends, including Strachey. Social gatherings opened up free discussions of art, sex, and literature. As many of the circle were gay or bisexual, Bloomsbury offered a much-needed community of relative openness and support in an institutionally homophobic society that pathologised lesbianism and gender ‘deviance’, and criminalised same-sex male relationships.
In her essay on Dorothy Wordsworth for The Common Reader (1925 and 1932), Woolf’s description of Dorothy’s autonomy at Dove Cottage was surely exhilarated by personal experience:
No family duties or professional tasks distracted them. Dorothy could ramble all day on the hills and sit up talking to Coleridge all night without being scolded by her aunt for unwomanly behaviour. The hours were theirs from sunrise to sunset, and could be altered to suit the season. If it was fine, there was no need to come in; if it was wet, there was no need to get up. One could go to bed at any hour. One could let the dinner cool if the cuckoo were shouting on the hill and William had not found the exact epithet he wanted […] Custom, convention, everything was subordinated to the absorbing, exacting, exhausting task of living in the heart of Nature and writing poetry.
Wordsworths and ‘Bloomsberries’ shared an interest in domesticity that embraced art and emphasised the importance of friendship. The Wordsworths’ wider social scene has some similarities with the early twentieth century group, both being close but fractious communities. Woolf’s flirtation with her sister’s husband after the birth of their first child appears as claustrophobic as Coleridge’s obsession with Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, if not as dramatic and opium-fuelled.
Initially at least, both groups eschewed convention (Wordsworth became increasingly conservative with age). Both were important cultural figures and influential critics in their respective eras. As well as poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey, Coleridge’s childhood friend Charles Lamb wrote essays for the London Magazine, which also published Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). De Quincey was the next tenant of Dove Cottage after the Wordsworths moved out. In the Bloomsbury age, Woolf wrote book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and essays for Vogue. Roger Fry, her friend and future biographical subject, curated art exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 coining the term ‘Post-Impressionism’, controversially championing the likes of Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin and Cézanne.
While they retained London lodgings in Gordon or Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury’s artistic, emotional and sexual relationships took form across an arrangement of country houses (never too far from the capital). In the images that stick in my mind they are always in the garden; they relax, play, and chat beneath fair skies in places like Garsington, the manor of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Strachey assumes signature cross-legged poses, clasping books and parasols across a spectrum of drawings, paintings, and photographs.
Woolf and Bell ultimately attained their own countryside havens too, at Asheham, Monk’s House and Charleston in Sussex. Like Tidmarsh, at Charleston’s centre was the partnership of a woman and a queer man, this time between Bell and fellow painter Duncan Grant. Every inch of the house is inscribed with the marks of their joint creativity. Canvas could not contain their brushstrokes: they painted doors, mantelpieces, furniture. Portraits of friends and family hang among still lives and landscapes. When I visited years ago, I remember noticing that someone had upturned a ceramic colander and repurposed it as a light shade.
A more melancholy example of the Wordsworths’ influence on modern artists is short story writer Katherine Mansfield’s unrealised ambition of ‘Heron Cottage’. She imagined a country retreat for herself and her husband John Middleton Murry, a place of ‘bees, a cow, fowls, 2 turkeys, some indian runner ducks, a goat, and perhaps one thoroughly striking beast like a unicorn or a dragon.’
The avian name, an echo of Dove Cottage, came from Mansfield’s beloved brother Leslie Heron Beauchamp, who died in a regimental training accident in Belgium in 1915. In bereavement and memorialising through place, Mansfield and the Wordsworths share parallels of loss. Dorothy and William called a nearby fir-lined path ‘John’s Grove’ after their sailor brother, who liked to walk there. Wordsworth commemorated the site in one of his poems on ‘The Naming of Places’, retracing John’s steps and imagining him at sea, pacing his cabin. A captain for the East India Company, John died in the shipwreck of the Earl of Abergavenny in 1805. As Polly Atkin writes in Recovering Dorothy (2021), John’s Grove, ‘a haunt of the household’, would become ‘even more haunted after his death.’
Travelling between Britain and the continent to find relief for the tuberculosis that led to her death in 1923, Mansfield evoked the example of Dorothy and William in her letters to Murry. She recommended rereading Dorothy’s journals to remind him of ‘W. sticking peas & D. lying in the orchard with the linnets fluttering around her’. Of the pair, she wrote: ‘they had no end of a good time — but we could have a better.’ Mansfield professes a familial connection to several Romantics: ‘Keats, W.W., Coleridge […] are the people with whom I want to live — those are the men I feel are our brothers’. She wrote: ‘I understand Wordsworth & his sister and Coleridge. They’re fixed — they’re true — they’re calm.’
In his article ‘“Our Special Set”: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and William Wordsworth’ (2020), Richard Cappuccio explores the ‘shared literary histories’ between the two modernists. When the nascent Hogarth Press published one of Mansfield’s stories in 1917, he suggests that a typesetting error reveals Woolf’s recognition of Wordsworth’s profound influence on Mansfield. Instead of the correct title ‘Prelude’, the first dozen pages read ‘The Prelude’; this is the name by which Wordsworth’s epic unfinished autobiographical poem came to be known. ‘Prelude’, which drew heavily on Mansfield’s own past, revolves around the lively child Kezia, reworking Wordsworth’s essential themes of childhood, memory, and nature. The story’s episodic structure contains instances of what Wordsworth termed ‘spots of time’, when these three aspects coalesce and the mundane world is suddenly infused with intense, mysterious meaning.
Mansfield’s appreciation for the Wordsworths did not preclude some gentle mockery. Her diary has an 1889 quotation from the critic Walter Pater regarding Wordsworth’s ‘personal happiness’: ‘A calm, irresistible well-being — almost mystic in character, and yet doubtless connected with physical conditions.’ Underneath, she penned a humorous poem from Dorothy’s reverential perspective, more piquant than Carrington’s letter but equally as interested in quotidian routines:
[...] He rises and breakfasts sharp at seven, Then pastes some fern-fronds in his book, Until his milk comes at eleven With two fresh scones baked by the cook. And then he paces in the sun Until we dine at half past one. 'God and the cook are very good' Laughs William, relishing his food. (Sometimes the tears rush to my eyes: How kind he is, and oh, how wise!) After he sits and reads to me Until at four we take our tea. My dear you hardly would believe That William could so sigh and grieve Over a simple, childish tale How 'Mary trod upon the Snail,' Or 'Little Ernie lost his Pail.' And then perhaps a good half-mile He walks to get an appetite For supper, which we take at night In the substantial country style. [...]
Sadly, unlike the other women who achieved the physical spaces necessary to experiment with homemaking, Mansfield’s idyll remained an imaginative dwelling. In 1918, Murry printed 100 copies of her story ‘Je ne parle pas français’ under the name of the Heron Press, twenty of which spoiled. Along with an edition of Murry’s poems, this was the only material manifestation of Heron Cottage.
It is striking that these women, all of whom had queer relationships at some point in their lives, were drawn to the Wordsworths’ life at Dove Cottage. This may simply be testament to Wordsworth’s central role in British literature, a poet to whom every schoolchild would be introduced. Yet, channeled through the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the calls of theorists like Edward Carpenter for a ‘return to nature’, the rural Wordsworthian life may have resonated with those seeking new ways of living during the traumatic epoch and aftermath of the First World War. The Wordsworths, too, experienced a time of destabilising international warfare that developed from the French Revolution (which Wordsworth initially supported).
The easy companionship of the Wordsworths’ sibling bond seems to have signified the more equal relationships that these women sought in the early twentieth century, self-consciously distancing themselves from Victorian strictures of self-denying femininity. Dove Cottage’s household, although it expanded to include Wordsworth’s wife Mary and their children, was not founded upon the heterosexual pairing of man and wife. Perhaps this was its appeal for later figures desiring artistic status or queer potential within domesticity. As the unmarried sister, Dorothy was not simply an extra pair of hands to be squirreled away in a corner, low on the domestic hierarchy. She was her brother’s collaborator, exerting a profound creative influence on all around her.
William wrote of Dorothy in ‘The Sparrow’s Nest’ (1801): ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears […] And love, and thought, and joy.’ For later artists, her role at Dove Cottage was an inspiring antecedent for a life of creativity expressed through art, homemaking, and multifaceted forms of attachment beyond marriage.
If you want to read more:
Last year, I interviewed poet Polly Atkin in Grasmere, after writing about her recuperative biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth for Lucy Writers. In contrast to previous scholarship, Atkin’s book focuses on Dorothy’s lifelong experiences of chronic illness, which left her housebound in later years, and confronts ableism in nature and life writing.
PA: A lot of nature writing and ‘nature cure’ writing is rooted in the wilderness-body ideal. This is similar to Kathleen Jamie’s idea of the Lone Enraptured Male, who is not only white, middle class and male but also healthy. You know, he has to be healthy to strike out into the wilderness.
I think it owes a lot to a colonial mindset about conquering emptiness. Even the idea of wilderness is a western concept that erases native people. So much British nature writing is wrapped up in the idea of empty wilderness. And obviously, when you look at the Wordsworths’ writing, you see a peopled landscape. We’re within a peopled landscape. And the idea that you can have anywhere in the UK which is empty! If there’s anywhere that’s empty in the UK, it’s because someone has been cleared off it. And that’s not a good thing.
Read the whole interview here.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of the cherry log! A future issue will delve more into Rebecca Birrell’s This Dark Country (2021) and her explorations of intimacy and homemaking in early 20thc women’s art. If you’re interested, you can buy the book here or find it at your local bookshop. You can buy Polly Atkin’s biography here - and I highly recommend her beautiful poetry as well.
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