She didn’t have to spell out the dangers; Dorothy knew what she meant. During a recent stay in France, William had had an affair with a Frenchwoman and fathered a baby girl. Now he was in disgrace with his family, and nobody considered him a fit companion for his maiden sister—nobody, that is, but Dorothy herself. She had been stunned by the news, but a conflict between conventional morality and the actions of her brother was no conflict at all; her loyalty never wavered. She even pulled together her French and took over the necessary correspondence with his ex-mistress. “I consider the character and virtues of my brother as a sufficient protection,” she told her aunt coolly, and she added that spending time with William was turning out to be a fine way to expand her education. “I have regained all the knowledge I had of the French language some years ago.” Her aunt would not have missed the subtext.
But when she picked up her pen to compose this rejoinder, the first thing Dorothy wanted to establish—even before she launched into her defense of William—was what she was eating. “I drink no tea … my supper and breakfast are of bread and milk and my dinner chiefly of potatoes by choice,” she wrote. It was a diet practically biblical in its simplicity, a perfect stand-in for the dignity of her new commitment. Dorothy maintained strong family ties all her life, but the food of this trek—inscribed in the letter as if it were a placard to be carried overhead—proclaimed her allegiance. She was William’s sister, and it was not just a relationship, it was a calling. She would live as she chose.
The Grasmere Journal is full of food; in fact it’s so voluble on the subject that Dorothy has gained a culinary reputation as well as a literary one. Today, when tourists visit the Wordsworth home that’s come to be known as Dove Cottage, they can see where Dorothy kneaded bread and rolled out pie dough; they can envision the large open fireplace with pots and pans hanging above it (the space is now occupied by a Victorian-era range); they can go into the garden and imagine her gathering broccoli, potatoes, radishes, and spinach. Afterward they can wander through Grasmere and stop at the very shop, more or less, where Dorothy went on a cold Sunday looking for the “thick” gingerbread that William preferred.
Unfortunately for culinary sleuths, however, the trail grows cold here. Apart from the Grasmere Journal, surprisingly little in Dorothy’s extensive written archive—letters, travel journals, more diaries—touches on what she cooked or ate. There are enough scattered passages, especially in her travel writing, to remind us that she was in the habit of paying attention to food. But only during the Grasmere Journal years did she make a point of writing about it regularly. At first glance, then, her food story seems to begin and end in those pages. But if you look more closely, and take into account some of her later journals, which have never been published, it turns out that Dove Cottage gives us only the first act of her food story. There was a second act, which took place twenty-five years later in a distant village called Whitwick; and a third, back in the Lake District, during which she gradually, sometimes cheerfully, lost her mind.
Dove Cottage was a whitewashed house on the busy road between Ambleside and Keswick, a cluster of six dark rooms that were cold and nearly empty when Dorothy and William moved in just before Christmas of 1799. He was twenty-nine, burning to be a great poet; she was a year younger and burning to help him. They examined the place as best they could without much light. The main sitting space downstairs lacked a proper ceiling—it was merely the floorboards of the room above—and the room they thought to use as an upstairs sitting space filled with smoke as soon as they tried to light a fire. Privacy was going to be impossible; the slightest noise bounded from room to room. Dorothy had never seen inside the house before she walked through the door, but she had been dreaming for years about finding a simple dwelling where she could make a home for William. She used to furnish it in her mind; sometimes she set the table for tea and planned what they would talk about. Now she knew exactly what she was looking at: here was paradise.
And it was, but there’s always a serpent. This one bore the much-loved face of a family friend from Yorkshire named Mary Hutchinson. She arrived for a visit two months after they moved in, stayed five weeks, and by the time she departed William knew he was in love with her. In the middle of May he set out on a walk to her home in Yorkshire, taking his brother John with him. Dorothy, who normally relished these marathon treks across country, stayed back this time: she didn’t want to be there when William proposed. On the day he left, her emotions were on such a rampage she burst into tears the moment he was out of sight; and that evening she opened a notebook.
May 14 1800. Wm & John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at 1/2 past 2 o’clock—cold pork in their pockets. I left them at the turning of the Low-wood bay under the trees. My heart was so full that I could hardly speak to W when I gave him a farewell kiss.
She cried for a long time, she wrote, and then went out for a chilly walk by the shore of the lake, which looked “dull and melancholy.” She described the berries and wildflowers she had seen, and she named them. She remarked on the stirring views, she said she had encountered a blind man “driving a very large beautiful Bull & a cow,” and she recalled that she kept stopping to sit down despite the cold. Her eyes had always been sharp, and she had an artist’s instinct for focus; now she would put those gifts to work. “I resolved to write a journal of the time till W & J return, & I set about keeping my resolve because I will not quarrel with myself, & because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again.”
“I will not quarrel with myself.” This vow set the tone, not only for what became the Grasmere Journal, but for the way Dorothy would live from that day on. Long ago she had chosen her future without hesitation: she would be William’s sister, the word “sister” going round and round in her imagination until it blossomed into the glory of a life’s work. She would care for him, cook for him, and be the handmaiden to his poetry. Now, caught up in the trauma of William’s departure, she returned to that commitment and strengthened it: she would permit no flicker of dissatisfaction, unease, or resentment. She knew precisely the degree of happiness she could expect, and she was determined to want no more. William was going to marry, she told herself; his bride would join their household, and Dorothy would give her whole heart to the new configuration—she would, she would, she would. “Arrived at home with a bad head-ache … Oh! that I had a letter from William!”
Writing the journal, which she kept on doing even after her brothers returned from Gallow Hill, was what sustained her during the two and a half years of William’s engagement. All day she gathered up impressions as greedily as a bird pecking about in a newly planted field. Then she opened her notebook and filled page after page with her quick scrawl, describing the crows and ravens, the colors of the lake, the twigs and catkins and clouds and moonlight. She recorded the walks she and William took, their visitors, their illnesses, their quiet evenings, their work in the garden and orchard. And, continuing as she had started with her very first sentence, she wrote about food. Assembling the ingredients and preparing their simple meals was a process that went on continually, and it comes up in these pages over and over like the gently recurring rhymes in a sonnet. She picked peas from the garden, she took apples from the orchard. Their neighbors brought them gooseberries and she turned out pies and tarts and puddings. She bought bacon from another neighbor and gingerbread from the blind man down the street. They caught fish from the lake. She baked bread, she made broth, she bottled rum, she boiled eggs. After years in which her letters and journals said little about food, now it’s everywhere.
Why this sudden attention to their meals? They hardly constituted a novelty: Dorothy had been cooking for William for years. But the notes on food served a different purpose from the other jottings in her journal. When she wrote about the clouds and flowers, the beggars and the gypsies, she was writing for William. She liked to feel that she was his companion, perhaps