Miss Simpson stayed to tea

Philippa Tristram

  • William Wordsworth: A Life by Stephen Gill
    Oxford, 525 pp, £17.50, March 1989, ISBN 0 19 812828 2

Most great writers, if only in indirect ways, offer some representation of their own life, but the biographer faces a particular problem where interpretation has already been shaped by his subject in autobiography. Wordsworth was not the only writer of his period to dislike the public appetite for private information, or to seek to forestall the biographer’s ‘abominable use’ of letters and personal anecdote by trying himself to control what should, and should not, be offered to the public. Moreover, in the different versions of The Prelude, and in the notes dictated late in life, he offered different interpretations.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions