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Introduction: Sara Coleridge and the Contexts of Authorship

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The Vocation of Sara Coleridge

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Abstract

Schofield establishes the conceptual basis for this much-needed study of Sara Coleridge as an author. The chapter offers a survey of studies of Sara Coleridge, biographical and critical, from 1852 to the present, and analyses how changing constructions of gender have influenced perceptions of her life and work. Noting the predominance up to now of biographical approaches to Sara Coleridge, the chapter considers the contrasting emphases of this book’s literary and critical methodology, which opens new perspectives upon her development as an author in the public sphere. The chapter introduces a hitherto unrecognized religious writer of the period of the Oxford Movement: a polemicist who was the peer of major figures such as John Henry Newman and F. D. Maurice, and recognized as such in her day.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Elaine Showalter , ‘A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists’, in The Theory of Criticism from Plato to the Present: A Reader, ed. by Raman Selden (London: Longman, 1988), pp. 517–541 (p. 549).

  2. 2.

    Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 39.

  3. 3.

    Kenneth Curry , Southey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 42.

  4. 4.

    Thomas De Quincey, ‘Lake Reminiscences from 1807 to 1830’ by the English Opium Eater, V: Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 6 (1839), 513–517 (p. 514).

  5. 5.

    Molly Lefebure , The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Gollancz, 1986, p. 220).

  6. 6.

    Jeffrey W. Barbeau , Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Molly Lefebure , Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner: Coleridge and his Children (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2013). Katie Waldegrave , The Poets’ Daughters: Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge (London: Hutchinson , 2013).

  7. 7.

    Jeffrey W. Barbeau , ‘Sara Coleridge on Love and Romance’, The Wordsworth Circle, 46 (2015), 36–44.

  8. 8.

    Eleanour A. Towle , A Poet’s Children: Hartley and Sara Coleridge (London: Methuen, 1912). Kathleen Jones, A Passionate Sisterhood (London: Virago Press, 1998).

  9. 9.

    David Newsome , The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and Henry Manning (London: Murray, 1966), p. 373.

  10. 10.

    ‘Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge’, Edinburgh Review, 139 (1874), 44–68 (p. 56, p. 61, p. 56).

  11. 11.

    Henry Reed , ‘The Daughter of Coleridge’, in L. N. Broughton, Sara Coleridge and Henry Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1937), pp. 1–16 (p. 3, p. 9, p. 12, p. 2).

  12. 12.

    The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria, WLMSA / Coleridge, Sara / 78.

  13. 13.

    Joanne Wilkes , Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen , Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Joanne Wilkes’s discussion of Sara in this book is a single component of a much broader study, which presents much new and valuable material on nineteenth-century women’s authorship.

  14. 14.

    Mary Poovey , The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft , Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. xi.

  15. 15.

    Donelle Ruwe , ‘Opium Addictions and Meta-Physicians: Sara Coleridge’s Editing of Biographia Literaria’, in Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism, ed. by Joe Faflak and Julia M. Wright (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 229–251.

  16. 16.

    Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 205, p. 230 n.

  17. 17.

    Alison Hickey , ‘“The Body of My Father’s Writings”: Sara Coleridge’s Genial Labour’, in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship, ed. by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (Winsconsin: University of Winsconsin Press, 2006), pp. 124–147 (p. 132, p. 129).

  18. 18.

    Dennis Low , The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

  19. 19.

    Peter Swaab, ‘“The Poet and the Poetical Artist”: Sara Coleridge as a Critic of Wordsworth’, in Grasmere, 2012, Selected Papers from The Wordsworth Summer Conference, complied by Richard Gravil (Penrith: Humanities-EBooks, LLP, 2012), 130–146.

  20. 20.

    Alan D. Vardy, Constructing Coleridge: The Posthumous Life of the Author (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  21. 21.

    George Herring , What Was The Oxford Movement? (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 17–18.

  22. 22.

    Owen Chadwick , The Victorian Church, Part One, 1829–1850, 3rd edn (London: SCM Press, 1997), p. 170.

  23. 23.

    Piers Brendon , Hurrell Froude and The Oxford Movement (London: Elek, 1974), p. 157.

  24. 24.

    Owen Chadwick , The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 29.

  25. 25.

    Slavoj Žižek , The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2008), p. 236; Žižek’s emphasis.

  26. 26.

    James Vigus , ‘James Vigus reads Constructing Coleridge: The Posthumous Life of the Author’, Coleridge Bulletin, n. s., 38 (2011), 134–136 (p. 135).

  27. 27.

    Joanne E. Taylor , (Re-)Mapping the “native vale”: Sara Coleridge’s Phantasmion’, Romanticism, 21 (2015), 265–279 (p. 276, p. 272).

  28. 28.

    Roland Barthes , ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, ed. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142–148 (p. 148).

  29. 29.

    Michael Macovski , Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 3.

  30. 30.

    Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 378.

  31. 31.

    Robert Piercey , The Crisis in Continental Philosophy: History, Truth and the Hegelian Legacy (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 21–22.

  32. 32.

    F. J. A. Hort , ‘Coleridge’, Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University, 1856 (London: Parker, 1856), pp. 292–351 (p. 346).

  33. 33.

    Douglas Hedley , Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: ‘Aids to Reflection’ and The Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 298–299.

  34. 34.

    ‘Tractarianism ’ is an epithet commonly applied to the Oxford Movement by contemporaries and subsequent generations.

  35. 35.

    Immanuel Kant , Critique of Pure Reason, ed. by Marcus Weigelt (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 52.

  36. 36.

    Lucy Newlyn , Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 232.

  37. 37.

    Annette R. Federico , ‘Introduction’, Gilbert and Gubar’s ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’ After Thirty Years, ed. by Annette R. Federico (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), pp. 1–26 (p. 9).

  38. 38.

    Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria WLMS A / Coleridge, Sara / 78; Sara’s emphases.

  39. 39.

    Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Man and Women of the English Middle Class, 1750–1850 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 33.

  40. 40.

    Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 51.

  41. 41.

    Jane Spencer, Literary Relations: Kinship and The Literary Canon 1600–1830 (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 189.

  42. 42.

    Derwent Coleridge, The Scriptural Character of the English Church (London: Parker, 1839), pp. xxiv–xxvii.

  43. 43.

    Nicola Healey , Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 66.

  44. 44.

    Andrew Keanie , Hartley Coleridge: A Reassessment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 34.

  45. 45.

    Hartley Coleridge, New Poems, ed. by E. L. Griggs (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 69, l. 2.

  46. 46.

    Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971, I (1956), p. 354; STC’s emphasis.

  47. 47.

    Excellent discussions of significant aspects of Phantasmion are to be found in Dennis Low’s The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets and in Joanne E. Taylor’s essay in Romanticism (21), 2015. See note 27.

References

Bibliography of Works by Sara Coleridge

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  • ———. 1847. Introduction. In Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, second edition prepared for publication in part by the late Henry Nelson Coleridge, completed and published by his widow, 2 vols, I, pp. v–clxxxvii. London: Pickering.

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  • ———. 1850. Introduction. In Essays on His Own Times: Forming a Second Series of the Friend, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by his Daughter, 3 vols, I, pp. xix–xciii. London: Pickering.

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  • ———. 1850–51. Dialogues on Regeneration. Unpublished manuscripts in the Sara Coleridge Collection, MS 0866, Harry Ranson Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

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  • ———. 1873. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, Edited by Her Daughter, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London: King.

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  • ———. 2007. Collected Poems, ed. Peter Swaab. Manchester: Carcanet.

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  • ———. 2012. The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Peter Swaab. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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General Bibliography

  • Anonymous. 1874. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge. Edinburgh Review 139: 44–68.

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  • Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Death of the Author. In Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, ed. Stephen Heath, 142–148. London: Fontana Press.

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  • Chadwick, Owen. 1990. The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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  • ———. 1997. The Victorian Church, Part One, 1829–1850. 3rd edn. London: SCM Press.

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  • ———. 1993. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols, IX. London: Routledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002.

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  • ———. 2001. Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 3 vols, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols, XVI. I. London: Routledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002.

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  • De Quincey. 1839. Thomas, ‘Lake Reminiscences From 1807 to 1830’, by the English Opium Eater, V: ‘Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge’. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 6: 513–517.

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  • Federico, Annette R. 2009. Introduction. In Gilbert and Gubar’s ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’ After Thirty Years, ed. Annette R. Federico, 1–26. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

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  • Forster, Margaret. 2004. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography. London: Vintage.

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  • Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2013. Truth and Method. 2nd edn. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 2000. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. 2nd edn. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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  • Griggs, E.L. 1940. Coleridge Fille: A Biography of Sara Coleridge. London: Oxford University Press.

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  • Healey, Nicola. 2012. Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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  • Herring, George. 2002. What Was The Oxford Movement? London: Continuum.

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  • Hickey, Alison. 2006. “The Body of My Father’s Writings”: Sara Coleridge’s Genial Labour. In Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship, ed. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson, 124–147. Winsconsin: University of Winsconsin Press.

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  • Hort, F. J. A. 1856. Coleridge. In Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University, 1856, 292–351. London: Parker.

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  • Jones, Kathleen. 1998. A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets. London: Virago Press.

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  • Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Marcus Weigelt. London: Penguin.

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  • Keanie, Andrew. 2009. Hartley Coleridge: A Reassessment of His Life and Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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  • Lefebure, Molly. 1986. The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. London: Gollancz.

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  • ———. 2013. Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner: Coleridge and His Children. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press.

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  • Low, Dennis. 2006. The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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    Robin Schofield

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Schofield, R. (2018). Introduction: Sara Coleridge and the Contexts of Authorship. In: The Vocation of Sara Coleridge. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70371-8_1

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