Book review: Jane and Dorothy — A True Tale of Sense and Sensibility, by Marian Veevers

“If the written word could cure rheumatism I think hers might, like a dock leaf laid on a sting”

VIRGINIA WOOLF is describing the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855), sister of the romantic poet William Wordsworth. She and Jane Austen (1775-1817) never met. Yet they had much in common: both were the daughters of gentlemen, a rector and an attorney, but both lived lives of relative poverty. Neither

ever married, so were categorised as ‘spinsters’, whose chastity was believed to accelerate physical decay. Both suffered the fate deplored by the early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, of being dependent on the generosity of their brothers for survival, and were looked on as a source of cheap labour by their families.