The Sexual Life of Catherine B.: Women Novelists, Blake Scholars and Contemporary Fabulations of Catherine Blake

Abstract

Writing in 1926, William Blake’s most reliable (and sole female) biographer Mona Wilson concluded the penultimate chapter of her biography with three paragraphs on Catherine Blake’s widowhood, the last of which suggests,

There is little independent record of Catherine Blake, nor is it needed. No one can understand Blake’s life without being aware of the significance of her helpful and faithful figure, nor is it possible to think of him with a different type of wife without loss, even without the utter destruction of the fabric of his life. And what other test is there of a perfect marriage? If the gossip about early dissensions, for which there is but a slender basis, be accepted, it only shows the greater victory for love and imagination. Blake’s own words but prove that the doubts and mental distress, which had for a time clouded his life, had cast a shadow over hers also, and that they were both the freer and the happier for his renewed confidence in himself. His love for her was no selfish dependence, the love ‘that drinks another as a sponge drinks water’ [VDA 7:17, E50] but that friendship of which he speaks so often as outlasting sexual love. The woman who had signed her name with a cross in the marriage register at Battersea Church had learnt from him, aided by her own love and belief in him, to share his work and to be his constant stay in spiritual as well as in material things. Even when he was away from her in a visionary Paradise, her bodily presence was necessary to him. Her life was one with his. (303)¹