Susan M. Levin. Dorothy Wordsworth: A Longman Cultural Edition. Pearson/Longman, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-321-27775-6. Price: US$9.80

Susan M. Levin’s new edition of Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings marks a welcome addition to our teaching repertoire. Like other Longman Cultural editions, this collection includes a generous sampling of different types of writing—primary literature, historical materials, etc., a format appropriate for Dorothy Wordsworth, whose “primary” works are composed mostly of journals, diaries, and letters. Levin also includes her poems, which Dorothy Wordsworth wrote without the intention of becoming a published author. With its mix of genres and supporting texts, this edition is particularly well suited to students reading Dorothy Wordsworth for the first time. Levin is well positioned to edit this volume, having written an important critical book on Dorothy Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, which included a scholarly edition of her poems. Levin’s earlier book places Dorothy Wordsworth in the context of an “ethics of care,” a feminist approach that values community over solitude, in contradistinction to the movement of much of the poetry written by poets such as her brother William. The inclusion of the “Narrative Concerning George and Sarah Green” (124-44) goes a long way to giving a sense of Dorothy Wordsworth as deeply concerned with the community and her role in it. This interpretation of Dorothy Wordsworth as embedded in the community and daily affairs seems implicit throughout this new volume. In this vein, Levin includes a section devoted to “Life in the Wordsworth Household.” A brief excerpt from the most popular cookbook of the period, Mrs. Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (244-46) is interesting, although I would have liked more of a connection between the book and Dorothy Wordsworth’s practice. Likewise, the letters (247-51) that follow oddly on the rather different topic of William Wordsworth as a possible spy in 1797 would have been more effectively presented with background on both the paranoia of the 1790s and on the episode, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge were overheard talking about Spinoza. Coleridge later immortalized the episode as comedy in Chapter 10 of the Biographia: James Walsh, the agent from the Home Office who checked to see if Wordsworth and Coleridge were French spies, hears “Spinoza” as “Spy Nozy,” and so on (Biographia Literaria, 194). The same wish for more context applies to the section on the alleged incest between William and Dorothy—a topic too fraught and complicated to be easily summarized (251-53). Whereas the collected poems are based on Levin’s earlier edition, the texts of the journals are generally based on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century editions of William Knight. In some cases, such as the Alfoxden journal, the manuscript version is missing, but for others it would have perhaps enhanced the collection to consult the manuscripts as well as the first published edition. In some cases, for instance, Knight’s use of ellipses (reproduced in this edition) reflects his own editorial judgment that certain passages were more important or relevant than others. One wonders if his judgment was always impeccable or if there is a pattern to the kinds of omissions we find. Some explanation for why Knight was followed would also have been useful. From the journals, the most substantial selection comes appropriately from the Grasmere journals. The reader gets a very good sense of the Wordsworths’ lives during this crucial period of their residence at Dove Cottage and of the central role that Dorothy Wordsworth plays in creating the home and the sense of home at Grasmere. The footnotes in this second section make useful connections to William Wordsworth’s poetry and to social and political issues of importance to the Wordsworths and to the time. The …