Catherine Macdonald Maclean

Catherine MacDonald Maclean taught at Edinburgh University and later at (what was then) University College, Cardiff at a time when there were not many women in British academia. She published a number of books about Scottish poets and others about the Wordsworths and Hazlitt. I couldn't find a date of birth for her by simple googling, but her first book was published in 1915, so I'd guess she was born before about 1890. She was obviously a respected figure in her field - later on she appears on title pages as "DLitt, FRSL", but in 1927 she was still "just" an MA.

This little book is a collection of nine essays - the first two are about Dorothy herself, the next three about how Dorothy and William cooperated, and the last four about William. Maclean is obviously a passionate Wordsworth enthusiast, but she's especially enthusiastic about Dorothy "...a woman of genius" "...a mind unusually sensitive and poetical" "...the most poetical woman of her generation" (a generation, Miss Maclean doesn't remind us, that included women like Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, ...).

However, allowing for a bit of overselling, what Maclean says about Dorothy's writing is sensible and helpful, and fits in well with at least those excerpts from her letters and diaries that I've looked at so far. Dorothy is a very precise, modest and conscientious writer who always manages to show us the magic in what she has seen with a minimum of fuss. And she notices the most extraordinary little things: "As lay down on the grass, I observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun, which made them look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, like animals of another kind, as if belonging to a more splendid world" (this is a passage Virginia Woolf also quotes in her essay on Dorothy). Her brother often takes these details and works them up into something grander, but not invariably better.

In the middle part of the book, Maclean explores the collaboration of William and Dorothy a bit more deeply, and sets out her theory that the "Lucy poems", if not a literal depiction of Dorothy, were the result of William's feelings for her. But what Maclean particularly values these poems for is "their utter withdrawal from the poetry of mating". Oops! Well, you wouldn't want love poems to be about sex, would you?

It's interesting to see that she feels she has to include two essays defending Wordsworth against modern detractors - "Vulgar errors" and "On the depreciation of Wordsworth's poetry". Virginia Woolf (who would probably have had endless fun with "the poetry of mating") being one of the chief suspects in the second essay. And it's curious to see that the modern writers she brings in to demonstrate that what Wordsworth stood for is still important are Thomas Hardy and Romain Rolland, both in their capacity as novelists. For Maclean, Wordsworth's use of language-registers and the way they fit the "substance" of his poems is much more important than the form this substance happens to be delivered in.

Interesting, but a bit of a period piece, really. Worth reading for the two Dorothy essays, but "the poetry of mating" is one of those unfortunate phrases it's going to be hard to shake off now I've seen it!… (más)