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The Vocation of
Sara Coleridge
z
Authorship and Religion
ROBIN SCHOFIELD
The Vocation of Sara Coleridge
Robin Schofield
The Vocation of Sara

Coleridge
Authorship and Religion
Robin Schofield
Oxford, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-70370-1 ISBN 978-3-319-70371-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70371-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964552
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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For Ness, Smudge and Brian, with love
Preface: The Coleridge Family and the
Problem of Names
Previous studies of Sara Coleridge have conveyed the impression that her
activities were confined to, and associated with, the private sphere. By
contrast, this book presents her as an author active in the public sphere
who intervenes decisively in what was a masculine genre of religious
polemics. I show Sara Coleridge to have been the peer of such major reli-
gious figures as John Henry Newman and F. D. Maurice, and recognized
as such in her lifetime. This study aims to make a significant contribution
to feminist literary studies, therefore, and to celebrate Sara Coleridge’s
radical and subtle subversions of the conventions of patriarchal author-
ship. Given this feminist viewpoint, and my contention that Sara Coleridge
is the most original and innovative critic of the Oxford Movement, my use
of her first name may seem incongruous. Like most other contemporary
Sara Coleridge critics, I have adopted this practice in the interests of clarity
to avoid confusion with her father, a risk which applies especially to a study
such as mine, in which I frequently discuss Sara and her father together.
All students of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s children must confront the
problem of how to refer to this generation without colluding in their dim-
inution. In the interests of equality, therefore, I avoid entirely the surname
‘Coleridge’ and its adjectival form, ‘Coleridgean’. I use the epithet STC
for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and first names for Sara Coleridge’s broth-
ers, Derwent Coleridge and Hartley Coleridge; and also for Henry Nelson
Coleridge, Sara’s first cousin, whom she married.
Oxford, UK Robin Schofield
vii
Acknowledgements
This book has its origins in gatherings of The Friends of Coleridge, at

Summer Conferences and Autumn Study Weekends. In thanking The
Friends of Coleridge, I would like to express my warm gratitude, in par-
ticular, to Graham Davidson, editor of The Coleridge Bulletin, and to
James Vigus, former Bulletin reviews editor. I would also like to record my
warm thanks to former Director of the Coleridge Summer Conference,
Nicholas Roe, and to his successor, Tim Fulford, for their generous
encouragement. I am most grateful, also, to Peter Larkin, who invited me
to speak on Sara Coleridge’s editing of Biographia Literaria at an Autumn
Study Weekend. The paper I researched and wrote for that weekend con-
tained the seeds that would grow into this book. I wish to add particular
thanks to another Friend of Coleridge, Nicola Healey, for her invaluable
and judicious comments on various aspects of my work on Sara Coleridge.
I should add that her book Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge:
The Poetics of Relationship provided an inspiring model for my study of
Sara Coleridge.
I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to my PhD supervisor at Oxford
Brookes University, Simon Kövesi. His thorough, rigorous professional-
ism and warmly genial guidance enabled me to discipline my passion for
Sara Coleridge’s work into focused and well-grounded academic research.
For all Simon’s invaluable encouragement and support, I wish to express
my heartfelt and warmest thanks. I wish also to thank others who helped
and guided me in various important ways while I was at Oxford Brookes:
Nicola Pohl, Caroline Jackson-Houlston, Simon White and Charmian
Hearne.
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Jeff Cowton for enabling me to consult tran-

scripts of letters by Sara Coleridge held by The Wordsworth Trust, Dove
Cottage, Cumbria, and for allowing me to quote from them. I am grate-
ful, also, to Rick Watson at the Harry Ransom Research Center, University
of Texas at Austin, for allowing me to consult, and quote from, Sara
Coleridge’s manuscripts in the Center’s holdings.
My capabilities in IT leave much to be desired, alas. My warm thanks
are due to Tomas Feeney, without whose expertise and patient, long-
suffering technical assistance I could not have produced the text of this
book.
I would like to thank Benjamin Doyle, commissioning editor at Palgrave
Macmillan, for his initial interest in the project, and his patience and sup-
port during the revision process. Finally, I wish to thank Camille Davies,
editorial assistant at Palgrave, for her advice and guidance in steering me
through the various stages of preparing the book for publication.
Contents
1 Introduction: Sara Coleridge and the Contexts

of Authorship 1
2 Towards a Vocation of Religious Authorship:

Collaboration and Dialogue, 1818–1837 33
3 ‘On Rationalism’: ‘The Authoritative Word’ and ‘Liberty

of Conscience’ 67
4 Biographia 1847: Plagiarism, Literary Property

and Dialogic Authorship 105
5 The Theory and Practice of Polemical Writing: Religious

Authorship, 1847–1849 141
6 Authorial Vocation and Literary Innovation, 1850–1851 183
7 Conclusion: Public Renewal, Personal Redemption 227
Index 249
xi
Abbreviations
ARCC Aids to Reflection, ed. by John Beer, The Collected

Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols (London:
Routledge. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press (1969–2002), IX (1993)
Biographia 1847 Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My
Literary Life and Opinions by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
second edition prepared in part by the late Henry Nelson
Coleridge, completed and published by his widow, 2 vols
(London: Pickering, 1847)
BLCC Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and
W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols, The Collected Works of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols (London: Routledge.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1969–2002), VII (1983)
CF E. L. Griggs, Coleridge Fille: A Biography of Sara
Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940)
Criticism The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought: Selected
Literary Criticism, ed. by Peter Swaab (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
CSCC On The Constitution of Church and State, ed. by John
Colmer, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
16 vols (London: Routledge. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1969–2002), X (1976)
xiii
xiv ABBREVIATIONS
Essays Essays on His Own Times: Forming a Second Series of the

Friend by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by his
Daughter, 3 vols (London: Pickering, 1850)
Extracts ‘Extracts from a New Treatise on Regeneration’, by
Sara Coleridge, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to
Reflection, ed. by Henry Nelson Coleridge, sixth edn,
2 vols (London: Pickering, 1848), II
HCL Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed. by G. E. Griggs and
E. L. Griggs (London: Oxford University Press, 1937,
repr. 1941)
HCPW The Complete Poetical Works of Hartley Coleridge, ed.
by Ramsey Colles (London: Routledge, 1908)
HRC Sara Coleridge Collection, MS 0866, Harry Ransom
Center, The University of Texas at Austin
M&L Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. by Edith
Coleridge, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: King, 1873)
Mudge Bradford Keyes Mudge, Sara Coleridge: A Victorian
Daughter. Her Life and Essays (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989)
NCIS Note on the “Confessions of An Inquiring Spirit”, in
Confessions of An Inquiring Spirit, ed. by H. N.
Coleridge (1849); repr. from 3rd edn, 1853, ed. by
H. St J. Hart (London: Black, 1956)
OR 1843 ‘On Rationalism’, by Sara Coleridge, in Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. by Henry Nelson
Coleridge, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: Pickering, 1843),
II
OR 1848 ‘On Rationalism’, by Sara Coleridge, in Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. by Henry Nelson
Coleridge, 6th edn, 2 vols (London: Pickering, 1848),
II
Poems Sara Coleridge: Collected Poems, ed. by Peter Swaab
(Manchester: Carcanet, 2007)
PWCC Poetical Works, 3 vols, ed. by J. C. C. Mays, The
Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1969–2002), XVI (2001)
TTCC Table Talk, ed. by Carl Woodring, 2 vols, The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols (London:
ABBREVIATIONS
xv
Routledge. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton

University Press, 1969–2002), XIV (1991)
WPTV William Wordsworth, ‘Poems in Two Volumes’, and
Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. by Jared Curtis, The
Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1983)
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Sara Coleridge

and the Contexts of Authorship
Innovation and Subversion

In her final religious works, the unpublished Dialogues on Regeneration
(1850–51), Sara Coleridge rejects the monologic medium of the essay for
the polyphonic form of dialogue. This extract, from the beginning of a
scene, suggests the subtle flexibility of dialogue in a religious context:
Irenia: How is it, Mr Thychnesse, that you have quite deserted

our colloquies on the New Birth, you who used to be
so warm and confident a defender of the Catholic
tenet?
Mr Thychnesse: The Catholic tenet, my dear Miss Marvell, needs no
defender, and to say the truth, debate has its limits.
There are people that can be convinced and people that
can’t be convinced. If it is mere waste to wash an ass’s
head with soap, to spend eau de Cologne on it is still
more wasteful.
Una: Well, though the ass may not be much brighter, yet the
atmosphere cannot but be refreshed by the odiferous
operation.
Thychnesse: For myself the discussion was quite superfluous. I have
studied the subject of regeneration thoroughly—thor-
oughly—and had placed my faith in it on the strongest
possible basis.
© The Author(s) 2018 1

R. Schofield, The Vocation of Sara Coleridge,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70371-8_1
2 R. SCHOFIELD
Irenia: You used to say that no faith is sure but that which is
implicit.
Thychnesse: And so I say still. All stable genuine faith is that which
is taken in with childlike simplicity and humility from
our spiritual superiors.
Irenia: Then why did you take such pains to study the ques-
tion, if study is not the way to a knowledge of the
truth?
Thychnesse: I studied the subject of regeneration not in order to
discover the truth but that I may be able to defend it
against its enemies. Yes, my dear young lady, I obtained
in this way the sharp sword of Inspired Scripture. I
armed myself with the breastplate of authority and held
before me the sevenfold shield of theological divinity.
Sevenfold do I say? Seventy and seven strong hides for
my buckler were fastened by that cloud of witnesses.
You may smile, Miss Una, but I can tell you that this is
no exaggeration. Seventy seven is under the mark.
Hundreds of pious and learned divines testify to the
truth that Baptism is regeneration. Why the very hea-
then called Baptism a regeneration!
Una: But the heathen could only have meant that it symbol-
ized change of mind and life. (HRC)
Sara presents an egalitarian model of discourse in which dialogue collapses

hierarchical distinctions. Informal conversation enables the two women to
encounter their male interlocutor on equal terms. Although Mr Thychnesse
adopts a pompous style (‘my dear young lady’, ‘thoroughly – thoroughly’)
that seeks to maintain patriarchal dominance, the women are clearly and
subversively in charge.
As the scene progresses, Una and Irenia draw out Mr Thychnesse to
express himself with increasing absurdity; Una can barely contain her
mirth at his absurd, quasi-biblical hyperboles. The comic theatricality of
the scene, which satirizes Thychnesse’s unreflecting acceptance of the
authority of ‘our spiritual superiors’, recalls Molière’s Tartuffe, in which
the maid Dorine exposes her master Orgon’s ludicrous self-delusions.
Underlying Sara’s comedy is her ongoing critique of the Oxford theology,
which conceives of discourse in monologic, authoritarian terms, its dog-
matic purpose to ‘convince’, rather than to collaborate and explore. Its
INTRODUCTION: SARA COLERIDGE AND THE CONTEXTS OF AUTHORSHIP 3
exponents, therefore, reject engagement in dialogue, expressed by

Thychnesse’s ludicrous trope of wasting perfume on a donkey. As this
brief glimpse suggests, Sara’s Dialogues on Regeneration are characterized
by literary innovation, genial humour, linguistic vitality and a subversion
of gender conventions. Such qualities serve Sara’s radical commitment to
religious inclusivity. These pioneering works will be explored in Chap. 6.
The term ‘vocation’ in my title refers to Sara’s dedicated commitment
to religious authorship in the final decade of her life, in which she perpe-
trates a subtly radical subversion of Victorian gender codes. In addition,
‘vocation’ carries the more general sense of ‘an occupation’ or ‘profession’
(OED). In using the term, I am influenced by Elaine Showalter, who
observes: ‘Victorian women were not accustomed to choosing a vocation;
womanhood was a vocation in itself.’1 From late 1837, when Sara embarked
upon her first original religious work, to November 1851, six months
before her death, when she completed the Dialogues on Regeneration, she
flouted convention by ‘choosing’ her ‘vocation’ (in the sense of an ‘occu-
pation’ in the public sphere). Furthermore, the interlinking strands of her
work, as STC’s editor and as religious author, were dedicated, with a
Miltonic sense of purpose, to the causes of religious liberty and spiritual
devotion. Ultimately, as this study will show, Sara’s public vocation and
domestic concerns, as widow and single parent, would coalesce.
It might reasonably be objected that, across Sara’s literary life as a
whole, her engagements were varied and occasional, and lacked the uni-
fied focus of a vocational commitment. Undeniably, the first two decades
of Sara’s writing life, up to late 1837, do not reflect the single-minded
drive of her contemporary Elizabeth Barrett, for example, who, according
to biographer Margaret Forster, by the age of twenty-one ‘considered
[herself] irrevocably set upon [her] future course [as] a poet’, and for
whom writing was already a ‘serious … business’, demanding whole-
hearted, unconditional commitment.2 I contend in this study that Sara
develops in purposeful focus through her writing career, and that, in the
closing decade of her life, her profound and sustained engagement in
religious polemics intensifies into a devotional calling. In her ‘Introduction’
to Biographia 1847, she characterizes STC’s ‘vocation’ in terms that apply
to the mature phase of her own writing life. His ‘vocation’, she contends,
was ‘to examine the truth of modes of thought’, and ‘to defend the Holy
Faith by developing it and shewing its accordance and identity with the
ideas of reason’ (Biographia 1847, I, p. lxii, p. lxv). As this study will show,
Sara pursues a similar ‘vocation’ as religious philosopher in her responses
4 R. SCHOFIELD
to the politico-theological disruptions of her times. In doing so, she

undermines decisively the masculine domain of academic theology.
‘[T]he Thoroughness of [Southey’s] Instruction’:

Sara Coleridge’s Formative Context
Sara Coleridge is a neglected figure in literary history. She was born in
December 1802, and died prematurely of cancer in May 1852, aged forty-
nine. She had two surviving elder brothers: Hartley, born in 1796, and
Derwent, born in 1800. Her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was absent
for much of her childhood and adolescence, during which her parents
lived together for ‘less than two years’ (Mudge, p. 19). For more than a
decade, between April 1812 and January 1823, Sara never saw her father.
She grew up in the household of her uncle, Robert Southey, at Greta Hall,
Keswick, in which she was born. She and her mother lived there as
Southey’s dependants until Sara’s marriage to her cousin, Henry Nelson
Coleridge, in 1829. Southey developed a close friendship with the
Wordsworths, with whom the Coleridge family already had intimate con-
nections. Southey and Wordsworth were Sara’s paternal influences in
moral and intellectual terms, as she explains in the final year of her life:
I knew dear Mr. Wordsworth perhaps as well as I have ever known any one
in the world – more intimately than I knew my father, and as intimately as I
knew my Uncle Southey … [M]y mind and turn of thought were gradually
moulded by [Wordsworth’s] conversation, and the influences under which I
was brought by his means in matters of intellect, while in those which con-
cerned the heart and the moral being I was still more deeply and impor-
tantly indebted to the character and daily conduct of my admirable Uncle
Southey. (Criticism, p. 96)
Relative to the common experience of middle-class women in the early

nineteenth century, Sara received a remarkably advanced education. The
home schooling for the children of Greta Hall was systematic and fol-
lowed a regular timetable. Sara’s aunts, mother and Southey were the
teachers. As Kenneth Curry remarks, ‘[t]he scholarship of Sara Coleridge
… is evidence of the thoroughness of [Southey’s] instruction’.3 Southey
told Unitarian minister John Estlin that she ‘has received an education
here at home which would astonish you’ (Mudge, p. 22). Sara benefited
also from the use of Southey’s extraordinary library, which contained ‘the
impressive total of 14,000 books’ (Curry, p. 45). De Quincey observes
that the library ‘was placed at the service of all the ladies’.4 Sara benefited
conspicuously from Southey’s scholarship and generosity. As I will show,
he was a significant influence upon her literary career. Like him, she would
become a writer of politico-religious polemic, and would revisit topics on
which he had written, such as Methodism. Southey’s household offered
an academically and socially stimulating environment for the young Sara.
As Poet Laureate from 1813, Southey was a public figure who received
eminent visitors: a ‘non-stop flow of bishops, politicians, academicians,
poets, judges, dons, merchant bankers and Harley Street consultants …
visited Greta Hall during [the] summer seasons’.5 This stirring formative
setting, combined with her remarkable home education, helped to form
the basis for Sara’s equally remarkable literary career.
The story of Sara Coleridge’s life has been uncovered in a number of
biographical studies. My priority, by contrast, is Sara’s religious writings of
her final decade, and how she became a religious author of such distinct
originality. The predominantly biographical focus upon Sara continues in
the present decade: in Jeffery W. Barbeau’s Sara Coleridge: Her Life and
Thought (2014); Katie Waldegrave’s The Poets’ Daughters: Dora Wordsworth
and Sara Coleridge (2013); and Molly Lefebure’s The Private Lives of the
Ancient Mariner: Coleridge and his Children (2013).6 Barbeau followed
his book with a biographical essay in 2015, ‘Sara Coleridge on Love and
Romance’, which focuses on her relationships with Henry Nelson
Coleridge and Aubrey de Vere.7 Waldegrave reflects a tendency to com-
bine a study of Sara with that of another figure, or figures. Eleanor
A. Towle’s A Poet’s Children (1912) places Sara’s life story alongside
Hartley’s, and Kathleen Jones, in A Passionate Sisterhood, narrates Sara’s
life in a context of the wider female community of the Lake Poets’ circle.8
Such approaches highlight Sara’s relationship with her literary fathers in
personal rather than literary terms, and emphasize Sara as STC’s daughter,
rather than Sara Coleridge the writer. Her life story has been foregrounded
as an exemplar of female filial subjection, and to lend new insight into STC
and the Lake Poets’ circle. I aim to redress the balance, and to show,
through critical analysis, how Sara becomes a religious author, and her
practice and conception of this vocation.
6 R. SCHOFIELD
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Studies

Religious and political instability determined Sara Coleridge’s authorial
vocation, and enabled her to participate in a sphere of public authorship.
However, that Sara’s mature writings are located in theological polemics is
a principal reason why she has been neglected as an author: her themes
soon lost their topicality in the second half of the nineteenth century. This
is true, also, of other writers of the period of the Oxford Movement: for
example, Sara’s theological opponent Robert Wilberforce, who had the
‘misfortune to produce his great doctrinal synthesis’, on Incarnation,
Baptism and the Eucharist, ‘in the three years which lie either side of
1850’.9 Doctrinal controversy would soon become insignificant in the
wake of two decisively influential publications: Darwin’s The Origin of
Species in 1859, and Essays and Reviews in 1860, which subjected the Bible
to modern scholarly criticism. Wilberforce’s ‘writings, therefore, became
out of date before they had had a chance to make the impact they deserved’
(Newsome, p. 373). Sara’s religious writings were subject to the same cir-
cumstances. In the 1840s, though, the subjects she addressed, such as the
doctrine of baptismal regeneration, were matters of urgent public debate.
Their reverberations registered in the sphere of party politics. Sara’s
polemical writings confront live politico-religious issues in the two decades
following the Reform Act of 1832. When these issues lost their urgent
topicality, her writings in response to them fell from view.
Two decades later, Sara’s daughter sought to redeem her from obscu-
rity. In 1873, Edith Coleridge published in two volumes the Memoir and
Letters of Sara Coleridge, which, according to E. L. Griggs, ‘was appar-
ently widely read, since four editions appeared within a year’ (CF, p. 189).
Edith Coleridge emphasizes religious subjects in her selection of corre-
spondence. The Memoir and Letters appears to have been successful in
temporarily boosting interest in Sara’s life and work. A reviewer of the
volumes in January 1874, though, perpetuates the myth of Sara’s literary
subservience: he describes her as Henry’s ‘zealous helpmate’, and STC as
her metaphysical ‘Pope’. Nonetheless, he concedes that, as editor of STC,
she ‘proved … an efficient substitute’ after Henry’s death.10
Henry Reed, an American scholar who had corresponded with Sara
near the end of her life, published a biographical tribute to her in July
1852, two months after she died. Reed’s account established a gendered
interpretation of Sara’s work. He constructs Sara’s ‘career of womanly
authorship’ in terms of a feminine ideal. He refers to the ‘maidenly mod-

esty’ of her early translations, which were published anonymously and
sanctioned by her uncle. Reed describes her volume of children’s poetry,
‘a mother’s work’, as an expression of ‘matronly modesty’. Written for her
children, the poems would have remained in the domestic realm had it not
been for Sara’s husband’s insistence on their publication. Her ‘editorial …
labours’ were ‘a fit filial and conjugal work’, Reed contends, and her ‘high
intellectual powers were held in harmony with … feminine delicacy and
gentleness’. Reed approves of Sara as STC’s editor, because the role implies
pious subjection to father and husband.11
E. L. Griggs follows Reed in foregrounding Sara’s gender. In Coleridge
Fille (1940), he emphasizes her ‘humility’ and ‘filial devotion’. Although
it remains a valuable quarry of information on Sara’s life, Griggs’s biogra-
phy is circumscribed by his belittling preconceptions of female authorship.
He remarks that, in Sara’s literary criticism, ‘a feminine bias often interferes
with her judgment’. He cites her alleged failure to ‘appreciate the increas-
ing use of the novel for sociological purposes’, and her conception of ‘fic-
tion as a representation of life’ (CF, p. 166, p. 215). Sara favours ‘the
novel of every day life’ as the form ‘in which women … have such perfect
success’ (Criticism, p. 187), and regards Jane Austen as the ‘princess of
novelists’.12 Griggs reveals his own masculine ‘bias’ in referring Sara’s liter-
ary judgements to the criteria of a patriarchal canon: ‘[i]f she failed to
recognize Browning, Tennyson, and Landor as we do to-day [sic], at least
she did not set up Letitia Landon, Hannah More, and Mrs. Hemans as
leading figures’ (CF, p. 215). Griggs’s disparaging attitudes towards
women’s authorship limit his attention to Sara’s religious writings. He
notices that Sara’s theology in ‘On Rationalism’ differs from STC’s, but
fails to develop this significant observation. Griggs does not treat chrono-
logically the last nine years of Sara’s life, which are her most productive.
Therefore, the structure of Griggs’s study occludes her development into
authorial maturity. Virginia Woolf’s eloquent and sympathetic essay on
Sara is a review of Griggs’s biography. Unsurprisingly, then, she is unaware
of Sara’s achievements as a religious author.
Bradford K. Mudge’s Sara Coleridge: A Victorian Daughter (1989)
appeared almost half a century after Griggs’s Coleridge Fille. Like Griggs’s
biography, Mudge’s is an indispensable resource; this ground-breaking
study reverses Griggs’s bias and presents a feminist reading of Sara’s life.
8 R. SCHOFIELD
Mudge recognizes that editing STC offers her an opportunity to enter the
literary marketplace. The Sara he constructs, however, conditioned to
believe in ‘the impropriety of female authorship’, chooses to remain sub-
servient to patriarchy (Mudge, p. 157). For Mudge, ‘On Rationalism’ was
a matter for Sara of ‘[d]iscovering her father within herself’, while in her
editorial contributions to STC’s work she ‘renounc[ed] authorship and
embrac[ed]’ patriarchal ‘authority’ (Mudge, p. 99, p. 157). Mudge’s mis-
interpretation of Sara’s literary relationship with STC arises from his lack
of attention to her religious writings, in which her consummate mastery of
STC’s ideas and their sources enables her to appropriate, redevelop and
exploit them in pursuing her own distinctive agenda. For example, Mudge
ignores Sara’s commitment to her religious dialogues when he asserts that
she ‘abandoned’ her autobiography in autumn 1851 ‘in order to devote
herself exclusively to a new edition of her father’s poems’ (Mudge, p. 10).
Although Sara collaborated with Derwent in preparing the 1852 edition
of STC’s Poems, and wrote most of the notes and the brief ‘Preface’, the
project that occupied her from September to November 1851 was an
original and innovative religious work, the Dialogues on Personality. In this
work, Sara appropriates ideas of STC, Aquinas and Leibniz in critiquing
the doctrinal theories of Robert Wilberforce, a leading Anglo-Catholic
theologian. The ‘Preface’ to STC’s Poems, just over seven pages long, was
written later, in March 1852, which suggests that Sara gave priority in her
final illness to the completion of original work. Mudge’s book has been
highly influential in the reception of Sara Coleridge. For example, twenty-
one years after its publication, Joanne Wilkes reinforced Mudge’s view of
Sara’s literary relationship with STC. Sara prioritized her ‘quest to pro-
mote her father’s genius’, Wilkes argues, in preference to producing origi-
nal writings of her own. Wilkes reads Sara’s subtle tactic of publishing ‘On
Rationalism’ as ‘Appendix C’ of Aids to Reflection (1843 and 1848) as an
act of ‘subordinat[ion] … in the service of her father’s output’.13 However,
to borrow Mary Poovey’s terms, Sara exploits ‘strategies of indirection
and accommodation’ in her publication of ‘On Rationalism’ that enable
her ‘to make [her] presence felt’.14 The success of her tactics is reflected in
the Bishop of London’s high praise for the essay. Wilkes echoes Mudge in
stating that Sara ‘abandoned’ her ‘autobiography … for the sake of yet
more editing of her father’s work’, and does not take into account the
polemical Dialogues on Personality which she produced in the autumn of
1851 (Wilkes, p. 39).
Twenty-First-Century Editions and Studies

In the twenty-first century feminist scholars have begun to investigate
Sara’s writings. Donelle Ruwe’s chapter ‘Opium Addictions and Meta-
Physicians: Sara Coleridge’s Editing of Biographia Literaria’ (2004) is a
case in point.15 Ruwe argues that Sara’s account of STC’s medical condi-
tion, in which she emphasizes ‘the bodily nature of the mind’, undermines
the dominance of a male-orientated creativity based in a disembodied
transcendental imagination. Ruwe refers to Isobel Armstrong’s suggestion
that, in the nineteenth century, ‘illness and physical weakness experienced
by … women writers gave them access to sensory knowledge that could be
maneuvered into a position of intellectual authority’ (Ruwe, p. 243).
Ruwe argues that Sara’s account of STC’s nervous disorder challenges his
concept of the relation of body and mind. She revises earlier readings,
therefore, in which Sara’s authorial individuality is subordinated to that of
STC. In a chapter also published in 2004, Alison Hickey emphasizes the
significance of collaboration in Sara’s work. In this respect, she follows the
lead of Jack Stillinger’s seminal study, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of
Solitary Genius (1991). Stillinger regards Sara’s ‘creative editing’ of
Biographia 1847 as a practice of ‘collaborative authorship’.16 Hickey simi-
larly holds that Sara, as editor, becomes ‘a co-producer’ of STC’s ‘work’.
She maintains that Sara’s ‘threefold paternity’ makes her particularly
receptive to the concept of ‘multiple authorship’.17
Dennis Low makes a case for Sara as an author in her own right. His
chapter on her earlier work in The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets
(2006) is a valuable and pioneering contribution to the study of Sara as
author.18 Low traces the development of her writings from the translation
of Dobrizhoffer to her novel, Phantasmion (1837). Low contends that
Southey is an enabling influence for Sara in supporting her early transla-
tion projects. I am indebted to this discussion and build on Low’s helpful
insights into Sara’s formative literary relationship with Southey; and I aim
to show the continuing influence of Southey in her later religious works.
Low also relates the essential conception of Phantasmion to STC’s literary
theories. Sara’s concurrence with STC’s principles in Phantasmion, Low
contends, demonstrates her ‘actively creative correspondence with her
father’s ideas and values’, and constitutes ‘a live, imaginative extension,
rather than a nostalgia-driven imitation, of [STC’s] literary corpus’ (Low,
pp. 141–142). This paves the way for my account of Sara’s innovative
10 R. SCHOFIELD
exploitation of STC’s metaphysics in her later religious writings. Because

Low focuses on women writers of the 1820s and 1830s, his account of
Sara’s authorship inevitably ends at 1837. This is the year in which she
begins to form the agenda for her projects in religious writing.
Interest in Sara Coleridge has grown significantly since the publication
of Peter Swaab’s pioneering edition of her Collected Poems (2007), in
which 120 of the 185 poems it contains were published for the first time.
In 2012, Swaab published a selection of Sara’s literary criticism. The texts
included were either published for the first time or recovered from out-of-
print nineteenth-century editions. Swaab’s ‘Introduction’ to this volume
presents the most balanced survey of Sara’s intellectual and authorial char-
acteristics to date, and emphasizes her linguistic vitality. He excludes her
religious writings, except where they have literary implications—such as
her comments on Newman’s prose style. Swaab has written authoritatively
on Sara as a critic of Wordsworth. My study draws on his essay ‘The Poet
and Poetical Artist: Sara Coleridge as a Critic of Wordsworth’ (2012),
particularly his emphasis upon the religious inflection of Sara’s response to
Wordsworth, as shown, for example, in her discussion of ‘A Song at the
Feast of Brougham Castle’.19 Swaab’s editions are absolutely indispensable
for students of Sara Coleridge, and are the most important publications on
her since the Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge appeared in 1873.
Alan Vardy, in 2010, produced an interesting and provocative study of
the Coleridge family’s attempts to restore STC’s reputation in the two
decades following his death.20 Sara’s contributions feature significantly in
Vardy’s study, in which he argues that the family sought to re-market STC
as a High Tory, High Anglican reactionary. Vardy implicates Sara in this
scheme of alleged cultural falsification. He argues that Table Talk is a prod-
uct of Henry’s ideology, and is actually ‘Henry’s [b]ook’, rather than a
balanced and accurate representation of STC’s thought (Vardy, pp. 45–63).
Henry’s brother, John Taylor Coleridge, and brother-in-law Derwent are
also implicated in this supposed cabal of ‘reactionary bigotry’ (Vardy,
p. 135). Vardy regards Sara’s treatment of STC’s plagiarisms as an element
of the wider family conspiracy. He attacks her for what he regards as cul-
pable distortion in her presentation of STC’s political thought; in certain
respects, Vardy asserts, her political judgement ‘comes close to obscenity’
(Vardy, p. 134). He attributes Sara’s alleged failure of political principle to
her marriage to ‘an ultra-Tory who kept her isolated in Regent’s Park’
(Vardy, p. 141). Vardy particularizes instances in which Sara expresses con-
servative attitudes in her letters, for example in relation to Chartism, in
which he correctly notes an ‘ambivalence’, in which Sara acknowledges

that Chartism’s ‘demands were in themselves reasonable’ while describing
its strategies as ‘misguided’ (Vardy, p. 135, p. 130). He cites a letter of
April 1848 in which Sara is afraid of Chartist ‘violence’ and, quite under-
standably as a widow and single mother, is concerned for her personal
safety in the event of civil disorder (Vardy, p. 128). Equally, though, it is
possible to cite letters and texts which show Sara not to have been influ-
enced by Henry’s politics, and that he encouraged and supported her in
publishing her work, including ‘On Rationalism’, which is radical in its
politico-religious sympathies, as Chap. 3 will show. There are letters in
which Sara expresses liberal viewpoints and unequivocal approval of Whig
Prime Minister Lord John Russell. This is particularly true of her attitudes
towards the Gorham case, in which she strongly opposes the High Church
and High Tory position.
The co-existence of conservative and liberal attitudes in Sara’s politics
is a common trait of her historical setting. Historian George Herring
observes: ‘the combination of conservatism and radicalism within the
same individuals and movements was actually very much a characteristic
feature … and at the root of much of the social reform of the period’.
Herring cites Richard Oastler, a ‘traditional’ Tory, who ‘initiated a move-
ment of clearly radical [factory] reform’.21 Meanwhile, the combination of
conservatism and radicalism in the Oxford Movement led to its decline as
a political force. Newman set out from a High Church, High Tory posi-
tion to assert the authority of bishops; but, as he moved from the late
1830s with increasing inevitability towards Roman Catholicism, he
subverted the episcopal authority which he had sought to defend. As
Owen Chadwick observes, ‘Newman, high Tory defender of the estab-
lished Church, had a streak of revolution’.22 Similarly, Hurrell Froude, the
most reactionary of the Oxford theologians, advocated the radical policy
of disestablishment, in asserting his wish for a ‘real’ church rather than a
‘national’ church.23 In this context, observes Chadwick, the Oxford
Movement’s adherence to ‘primitive tradition is not only a preservative
idea, but a quest for reform’.24 Sara, likewise, connected by marriage to
the High Tory branch of the Coleridge family, herself retaining some ele-
ments of social conservatism, adopts radical and liberal positions. Her
covert manipulation of authorial gender conventions is potently subver-
sive; and, in the religious writings that are the main focus of my study, her
viewpoint is distinctly and independently liberal. Vardy’s condemnation of
Sara’s politics reflects his adoption of Slavoj Žižek as his model of political
12 R. SCHOFIELD
analysis. Žižek’s Marxist ideology, adapted to what he terms ‘postmodern

post-politics’, cannot be directly applied to an historical setting in which
twenty-first-century concepts of political Left and Right did not exist.25 As
James Vigus notes, Vardy’s book displays considerable ‘inconsistency’ in
its political and biographical interpretations.26
Two biographical studies were published in 2013: Katie Waldegrave’s
joint study of Sara Coleridge and Dora Wordsworth, and Molly Lefebure’s
Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner. Waldegrave provides a wealth of con-
textual material: for example, on the sustaining family circle in which Sara
grew up. Lefebure presents a revisionary study that ranges widely across
STC’s activities and family relationships. She offers new insights into Sara’s
relationship with her father, and the ways in which his neglect, continuing
into adulthood, damaged her psychologically. Jeffrey W. Barbeau’s bio-
graphical study of Sara, published in 2014, seeks to tell the story of her life
and to explain her intellectual ideas. My study, which employs literary and
critical methodology, enlarges the perspectives presented by Barbeau,
particularly regarding Sara’s uniquely innovative responses to the Oxford
Movement and her deft subversion of conventions of authorship and gen-
der. Barbeau employs a narrative approach and is interested in the content
of Sara’s thought; I am interested in the underlying processes of her intel-
lectual and literary production. Also, as a biographer, Barbeau aims neces-
sarily to be comprehensive, which inevitably limits the space he is able to
devote to Sara’s editing of STC and the religious writings of her final
decade. In providing a detailed account of these key areas, and applying
literary and critical methodology to them, I am able to build on Barbeau’s
study by examining Sara’s religious works in the context of their literary
forms and use of language. In an essay of 2015, Joanne E. Taylor argues
that, in writing Phantasmion, Sara finds her own imaginative space inde-
pendent of ‘those of her precursors’. In focusing on Sara’s quest for liter-
ary ‘autonomy’, Taylor’s illuminating essay paves the way for my study of
Sara’s attainment of authorial independence in her mature religious
writings.27
Theorizing Sara Coleridge

My theoretical approach is distinct from that of previous commentators on
Sara Coleridge. Barbeau assumes, in writing a thinker’s life, a traditional
pre-Barthesian concept of personal authorship and the literary text, as do
earlier writers on Sara. My approach draws upon post-structuralist recon-
ceptualizations of the relationships of texts, contexts and authors. Indeed,

Sara’s own theory and practice anticipate post-structuralism in certain
respects. For Sara, a text is a composite product ‘made of multiple writ-
ings’, to borrow Barthes’s phrase.28 While a study such as Hickey’s refers
to the collaborative nature of Sara’s literary activity, I analyse the dialogic
nature of her texts. Two complementary theoretical models permeate my
reading of Sara: M. M. Bakhtin’s concepts of hybrid construction and dia-
logism; and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory. I am indebted,
also, to Michael Macovski’s discussion of Bakhtinian methodology, in
which Bakhtin ‘conceives of literary discourse as a composite of voices –
interactive personae that not only are contained within the literary text but
extend beyond it, to other works, authors and interpretations’.29 This con-
ception applies to Sara’s analyses of STC’s texts, and to her development
of dialogic forms of theological writing. Macovski explains Bakhtin’s dis-
tinction between Platonic and Socratic methodology. This distinction
informs my critical approach to Sara’s use of Socratic dialogue in her late
works on baptismal regeneration, in which form and meaning are
inseparable:
In contrast to the ‘already found, ready made’ truisms established by

Platonic dialectic, Bakhtin stresses the ongoing construction of knowledge,
an epistemological openness that he traces to the ‘Socratic method of dia-
logically revealing the truth’. Such a method holds that knowledge belongs
not to an ‘exclusive possessor’, but ‘is born between people collectively
searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction’. (Macovski,
p. 27)
Sara’s analysis of the Biographia text reveals STC’s ‘searching for truth’ by
dialogic means. He regards ‘truth’ as a ‘Divine Ventriloquist’, rather than
the ‘exclusive property of this or that individual’ (Biographia 1847, I, p.
xiv, p. xvii). Ultimately, Bakhtinian theory helps me to redefine the rela-
tionship between Sara’s editorial work and her independent writing: her
ethic of religious discourse in the Dialogues on Regeneration is based on a
collective and dialogic methodology.
Hermeneutic activity is at the heart of Sara’s literary career. As transla-
tor, poet, editor and religious polemicist, her writing is rooted in the inter-
pretation of others’ texts. Therefore, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and
Method enables me to develop my understanding of the dialogic nature of
Sara’s works. For Gadamer, ‘the hermeneutic phenomenon … implies the
14 R. SCHOFIELD
primacy of dialogue and the structure of question and answer’.30 Bakhtin

and Gadamer’s ideas inform my understanding of Sara’s redefinition of
religious discourse as a collaborative enterprise. Reactions to political and
religious reform between 1828 and 1833 precipitated a crisis that was
essentially hermeneutic, and continued for the two remaining decades of
Sara’s life. The interpretation of Scripture and Christian tradition was the
site of polemical contest. Sara develops her dialogic approach, therefore,
in response to hermeneutic division. She engages in dialogue with STC’s
Christian philosophy and ‘brings [it] down into the present hour’ (Essays,
I, p. lxxxiv). To apply terms Gadamer uses in relation to Hegel, Sara’s
treatment of STC’s ideas ‘consists not in the restoration of the past but in
thoughtful mediation with contemporary life’.31 Gadamer explains that
such ‘mediation’ involves a ‘fusion’ of the interpreter’s present ‘horizon’
with that of the ‘past’:
[T]he horizon of the present is continually in the process of being formed

because we are continually having to test all our prejudices. An important
part of this testing occurs in encountering the past and in understanding the
tradition from which we come. Hence the horizon of the present cannot be
formed without the past. There is no more an isolated horizon of the pres-
ent in itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired.
Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing
by themselves. (Gadamer, p. 317; Gadamer’s emphasis)
In the ‘fusion’ of her own present with STC’s historical ‘horizon’, Sara
rewrites and revitalizes his ‘past’ ideas for a new context.
In the penultimate section of her ‘Introduction’ to Essays on His Own
Times (1850), Sara explains her hermeneutic relationship with
STC. Ostensibly, she is asking the reader’s ‘pardon’ for having strayed
beyond the confines of discussing STC’s journalism:
In the foregoing sections I have noticed some salient points of my Father’s

opinions on politics,—indeed to do this was alone my original intent; but
once entered into the stream of such thought I was carried forward almost
involuntarily by the current. I went on to imagine what my Father’s view
would be of subjects which are even now engaging public attention. It has
so deeply interested myself thus to bring him down into the present hour,—
to fancy him speaking in detail as he would speak were he now alive. (Essays,
I, p. lxxxiv)
Sara describes how she has to free herself from the relentless momentum
of STC’s ideas. His ‘thought’ is a strong ‘stream’ in which she becomes
immersed, and for a time she is carried forward ‘almost involuntarily’. ‘ [A]
lmost’ is the vital word. It indicates that Sara struggles successfully to
attain intellectual independence, despite the force of STC’s ‘thought’.
Her independence then becomes mastery: she replaces the passive (‘I
was carried’) with the active (‘I went on’). No longer immersed in STC’s
thought, Sara stands apart from it and subjects it to critical analysis: ‘I
went on to imagine what my Father’s view would be of subjects which are
even now engaging public attention’. Sara takes charge of STC’s ideas and
applies them to the service of her own immediate agenda: ‘[i]t has so
deeply interested myself to bring him down into the present hour’. Sara’s
emphatic ‘myself’ privileges her over STC (‘him’) and indicates her liter-
ary dominance. In her transposition of STC’s work to ‘the present hour’,
Sara locates STC as a contributory voice within her own polyphonic texts.
Her appropriation of STC’s work is a coolly clinical process. It is not a
spontaneous, subconscious phenomenon, but a ‘bold’ hermeneutic
‘attempt’ upon which she has engaged deliberately. Sara’s description of
this process anticipates Gadamer’s theory, in which, according to Robert
Piercey, ‘the goal of hermeneutics is not to reconstruct the past, but to
mediate between traditional texts and contemporary life’ (Piercey, p. 153).
Sara’s authorial context in the decades following the 1832 Reform Act
was significantly different from that in which STC had worked. As emi-
nent biblical scholar F. J. A. Hort observed in 1856: ‘[t]he prodigious
changes which have taken place in the last forty years render much of the
Aids to Reflection very perplexing to those who forget the time when it
was written’.32 In STC’s critique of eighteenth-century mechanistic empir-
icism, and its deadening influence on the established church of the early
nineteenth century, he ‘rethink[s] … the Christian Platonic tradition,
principally through his wrestling with Kant and contemporary German
Idealism’. Douglas Hedley goes on to locate STC within ‘an Idealistic
tradition in British thought whose provenance lies in the Florentine
Renaissance and passes through later antiquity to Plato’.33 STC’s Neo-
Platonism is a significant factor in his struggle against Lockean modes of
thought. However, in Sara’s appropriation and development of STC’s phi-
losophy, she tends to occlude its Neo-Platonism, while exploiting overtly
its Kantian elements. In her ‘Introduction’ to Biographia 1847, she
foregrounds STC’s application of Kantian metaphysics to Christianity, but
16 R. SCHOFIELD
neglects to relate this to the Neo-Platonic strands of his thought. Sara’s

consistent Kantian bias is strategic. It enables her to make a case for STC’s
intellectual originality, and to construct a firm conceptual base for her
critique of Tractarianism.34
Sara contends that Tractarianism, by contrast with the Kantian substruc-
ture of her own religious thought, has no clear epistemological foundation.
Historian Owen Chadwick supports her view: Tractarian writers, he sug-
gests, were ‘anxious to strive after depth and to penetrate mystery even at
the expense of clarity, content to be less coherent so long as they were not
shallow’ (O. Chadwick 1990, p. 30). While Sara embraces Tractarianism’s
‘exalted’ devotional ethos, as expressed, for example, in ‘the sermons of
John Henry Newman’ and the poems of John Keble, she regrets that its
conceptual basis lacks clarity and cohesion: Newman’s devout ‘views’ are
‘supported by unfair reasonings’, she contends, which detract from their
potential for positive influence upon the practice of the Christian life (M &
L, I, pp. 176–177). Sara, meanwhile, presents a clear and consistent episte-
mology based on Kant’s critical analysis of the mind’s range and structure.
She expounds this epistemology with a remarkable combination of techni-
cal precision and poetic eloquence in her essay ‘On Rationalism’, discussed
in Chap. 3. Kant’s transcendental philosophy investigates ‘our manner of
knowing objects’,35 and Sara appropriates the terms of this enquiry in her
account of how the mind apprehends ‘the great objects of faith’ (Biographia
1847, I, p. lxxii). For Kant, the practice of metaphysics requires a prior
analysis of the powers of the mind in order to avoid dogmatism based on
unexamined assumptions. Sara adapts this rigorous principle to religious
experience: before we can apprehend ‘spiritual truth’, we must undertake ‘a
cleansing of the medium through which [it] is beheld’ (HRC). In Critique
of Pure Reason, Kant sets out to present ‘a treatise on the method’ of ‘meta-
physics …, not a system of the science itself’ (Kant, p. 21). Sara’s critical
analysis of religious ideas, insistent on rigour and cohesion of ‘method’,
suspicious of ‘system’ and dogma, reflects the influence of Kant’s project.
Sara Coleridge and Gender: Preliminary Perspectives

I discuss the strategies Sara employs to exploit and subvert the gender
conventions of her times. Scholars such as Anne Mellor and Lucy Newlyn
have drawn attention to the subtle recuperative strategies employed by
women writers of the Romantic period, and I have followed their lead in
examining Sara’s astute resourcefulness as a tactician. For example, Lucy
Newlyn comments that Romantic women writers ‘frequently collapsed the

division between writing- and reading-subjects as a mode of self-
empowerment’.36 This illuminates the way in which Sara’s editorial
engagement with STC’s work empowers her as an autonomous author.
Newlyn cites Mary Robinson’s poem, ‘To the Poet Coleridge’, as an
example in which the female reader seeks ‘to be included on equal terms’
in the male author’s ‘act of creation’: she extends ‘a paradise he has cre-
ated’. Robinson’s ‘slippage from an imitative to a supplementary model of
reading–writing’ anticipates Sara’s appropriation of STC’s voice in her
‘Introduction’ to Essays, for example (Newlyn, p. 255).
Mary Jacobus observes that Victorian women writers wished for ‘the
freedom of being read as more than exceptionally articulate victims of a
patriarchally engendered plot’.37 This seems to be especially true of Sara,
who engages on equal terms, in a masculine academic register, with the
leading scholars and theologians of her day. For example, in 1835, Julius
Hare, eminent German scholar and future Archdeacon of Lewes, had ini-
tially answered Thomas De Quincey’s exposure of STC’s plagiarisms from
F. W. J. Schelling. Following James Ferrier’s more rigorous discussion of
the topic in 1840, Hare implies that he regards Sara as a fellow scholar
who is better qualified to respond. He tells her that it is ‘indispensable for
you to take some notice of the various charges of plagiarism made against
[STC], especially by Ferrier and De Quincey’ (CF, p. 148). This is a
remarkable tribute, considering that Hare, with Carlyle, was one of the
leading Germanists of the day. It is not surprising, then, that Sara seeks to
secure the freedom to participate on equal terms in the masculine schol-
arly arena. In 1845, at the time she was editing Biographia, she admits to
having ‘take[n] a dudgeon being thought feminine, either in my small
writings or aught else’ (Criticism, p. 161). The scholarly and forthright
style of ‘On Rationalism’ demands the freedom for Sara of being read on
the same terms as her clerical interlocutors. Her tactical subtlety enables
her to do so while upholding convention.
Sara’s literary use of her father and her husband is strategic. She upholds
in her authorship the ethic of a ‘modesty of service’, to borrow John
Ruskin’s phrase, for reasons that are both religious and pragmatic (Poovey,
p. 35). A project of publication unsanctioned by male management or
family support would be undignified, ‘ungentlewomanly’, as she puts it. It
would compromise the writer’s standing as ‘a Lady’ (Criticism, p. 161).
This is a crucial consideration for Sara in 1845, both as STC’s editor and
particularly as a single mother and widow. As defender of the family name,
18 R. SCHOFIELD
responsible for the commercial viability of the literary legacy, Sara herself
must project an image of unimpeachable propriety. Reed’s account of Sara
shows how successful she was in appearing to combine the ‘vocation[s]’ of
‘womanhood’ and authorship (Showalter, p. 539). Barbeau, who does not
take account of Sara’s strategic manipulation of convention, describes her
attitudes to women’s authorship as ‘outrageous’ (Barbeau 2014, p. 83).
Sara expresses the kinds of attitude Barbeau deplores when, in 1845,
she comments on the behaviour of ‘our old Keswick rector’s daughter,
Miss Lynn’. Eliza Lynn, aged twenty-three and single, was lodging in
London in order to research ‘at the B. Museum – in behalf of an historical
novel she has in hand’. Sara expresses strong disapproval of a ‘female’
‘ambition of publishing’. If a woman is to write and publish, the endeav-
our must arise from a family context, and must be conducted under the
management of a male relative: ‘[t]ill a Lady can publish under the super-
intendence and protection of a father, brother or husband, and carry on
her literary pursuits, in the bosom of her own family’, Sara contends, ‘she
had far better keep her productions to her own desk or content herself
with dwelling on the thoughts of others’ (Criticism, p. 161; Sara’s empha-
sis). Ironically, when she wrote this Sara was her own literary manager,
working on her pioneering edition of Biographia Literaria. The contra-
diction between Sara’s stated view and her practice has a notable prece-
dent. Poovey cites Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose ‘comment that a
woman should “conceal whatever Learning she attains” is sharply under-
cut by her mastery of Latin, German, Turkish, Spanish, and Greek and by
her own publications’ (Poovey, p. 40).
When Sara meets the multi-talented author ‘Miss E. Rigby’ in 1849,
‘perhaps the most brilliant woman of the day’, she comments that the
most notable of her ‘perfections’ are her ‘well-bred, courteous, unassum-
ing manners’ and her ‘thoroughly feminine’ qualities.38 Equally, in her
review of Tennyson’s The Princess, Sara promotes the received view that
men and women occupy separate and complementary spheres. The ‘moral’
of Tennyson’s poem is an ages-old ‘truth’, she maintains: ‘that woman, in
soul as in body, is no duplicate of man, but the complement of his being;
that her sphere of action is not commensurate or parallel with his, but lies
within it, sending its soft influence throughout his wider range, so that the
two have an undivided interest in the whole’ (Criticism, p. 107).
Nonetheless, as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall observe: ‘[p]ublic
was not really public and private was not really private despite the potent
imagery of “separate spheres”’.39 Sara’s editorship of her father’s works,
begun in collaboration with her husband, enables her to collapse the

unstable distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’. She performs in the
public sphere as an ostensible expression of private piety. Sara balances the
conventions of what Poovey terms ‘the Proper Lady’ with professional
authorship.
Sara Coleridge’s Anxious Brothers

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that in the nineteenth century
the ‘female anxiety of authorship’ was more ‘profoundly debilitating’ than
‘the “male” tradition of strong, father–son combat’.40 This prescription
does not apply to STC’s children. Sara engages in revisionary ‘combat’
with STC, while Hartley and Derwent feel diminished and disabled by the
literary presence of their father. Sara, by contrast, was empowered by the
gentle encouragement of her Uncle Southey at the beginning of her liter-
ary career. Although, as Jane Spencer suggests, ‘the literary daughter’ was
debarred from ‘inherit[ing] the father’s estate’, Sara exploits the educa-
tional opportunities of her upbringing to become STC’s literary and
intellectual heir.41 STC’s fragmentary work required expert reconstruction
and mediation. Mediation is the bridge between critical and creative
authorship for Sara. Her ‘self-creation’ involves ‘what Adrienne Rich has
called “[r]evision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of
entering an old text from a new critical direction”’ (Gilbert and Gubar,
p. 49). Rich’s definition of ‘revision’ applies exactly to Sara’s critical and
creative engagement with STC’s ‘old text[s]’.
For Sara’s brothers, by contrast, the figure of STC is a source of anxiety.
Derwent, a clergyman and schoolmaster, the sibling whose primary inter-
ests were not literary, produced one full-length book, The Scriptural
Character of the English Church (1839). Derwent’s ‘Preface’ reveals tense
disquietude. As a religious author, he seeks to free himself from the dis-
abling presence of STC. He expresses conscientious respect for his father,
but differentiates his work from that of STC and asserts a distinctive intel-
lectual identity. He is more concerned with ‘the apparent and the actual’
than STC, and insists more fully, he says, ‘on the necessity … of a ceremo-
nial worship’ and ‘the sacramental nature of all outward religion’. These
essential contrasts, Derwent asserts, arise from the differences between his
own and his father’s ‘mental pursuits’, and from the ‘legitimate influence
of [his own] sacred profession’. The distance between himself and STC,
Derwent explains, disqualifies him from editing his father’s literary
20 R. SCHOFIELD
remains. Derwent fears, nonetheless, that readers will inevitably judge his
work in the light of STC’s: ‘I am admonished that this comparison cannot
but be made by every reader of my father’s works, who may be induced to
cast an eye over that of his younger son’. Implicit here is Derwent’s frus-
tration that his status as STC’s ‘son’ will be the primary reason why he
might gain readers, rather than his own merits. Derwent insists, however,
that he has ‘worked out’ his own ideas ‘independently’. His book is not
‘an exponent of [STC’s] views’.42 As a parish clergyman, working with
practical problems of the church and Christian doctrine every day, defend-
ing Anglicanism against the influence of Baptists and Plymouth Brethren
in his Cornish parish, Derwent is confident in the integrity and coherence
of his religious position. Yet, he worries that readings of his work will be
inflected by reference to his father’s metaphysics. Derwent would subse-
quently abjure any aspirations to independent authorship to focus on his
clerical and educational career.
For Hartley, too, the legacy of STC was associated with debilitating
anxiety. Wordsworth and STC’s poetic idealizations of Hartley the child as
‘Faery Voyager’ (WPTV, p. 100, l. 5) and ‘limber elf’ (PWCC, I.1, p. 503,
l. l. 656) were inhibiting for Hartley the writer. As Nicola Healey con-
tends, ‘he was fighting a battle against a textualized version of … his self’.43
That Hartley was his ‘father’s favourite’, according to Andrew Keanie,
placed disabling pressures upon him.44 STC projected onto Hartley a leg-
acy of unsustainable intellectual and literary ambition. Hartley refers to
‘the awful weight | And duty of my place and destiny’ (HCPW, p. 232, ll.
23–24). Like Derwent, he could not escape the literary trap of his family
name. He recognized that he would be read as STC’s son, ‘[a] living spec-
tre of my Father dead’.45 Hartley’s response was to work in different liter-
ary modes to those of his father and to develop a ‘commitment to
miniaturism’, to borrow Keanie’s apt term (Keanie, p. x). Above all,
Hartley rejected STC’s metaphysics. He found STC’s religious philosophy
‘too large’ for his ‘comprehension’ and ‘too high’ for his ‘apprehension’:
the ‘celestial fire’ of STC’s intellect was ‘what [he] dreaded most’ (HCL,
p. 210, p. 199, ll. 4, 9). Just as Derwent is inhibited by the prospect of
theological comparison with STC, Hartley finds STC’s ‘Vast’ metaphysical
vistas incapacitating.46 At the same time, his idealization of STC creates
paralysing guilt. Sara, by contrast, thrives as an author within the family
setting. Far from idealizing STC, she is sharply aware of his literary and
personal disabilities, which she exposes in Biographia 1847. In sympathy
with the substance of STC’s intellect, she seizes the authorial opportuni-
ties for originality that his fragmentary oeuvre affords.
Literary Dialogue and Religious Polemics:

The Development of Sara Coleridge’s Vocation
of Authorship
I do not aim to present a comprehensive survey of Sara Coleridge’s whole

literary career; that would require a much longer book. Rather, I seek to
present an intensive study of certain elements in the development of her
authorship. My selection of these elements is determined by my belief that
Sara’s religious writings are her most significant works. I believe that her
ethic of dialogic writing and concept of vocational authorship develop
through, and are inseparable from, these works. I focus, also, on the liter-
ary and intellectual factors that contribute to her development as a reli-
gious writer. I recognize, therefore, that there are significant aspects of
Sara’s work that I do not cover as discrete topics: her development as a
poet, her fairy-tale novel Phantasmion, and the varied range of her literary
criticism, formal and informal. Each of these topics deserves a separate
study.47
My decision to concentrate upon a particular area of Sara’s work fol-
lows the comparable strategy of Peter Swaab who, in The Regions of Sara
Coleridge’s Thought: Selected Literary Criticism, focuses on her literary
criticism and omits her religious works: ‘I have made the pragmatic deci-
sion to omit Sara’s theological writings’, Swaab explains, because ‘[t]he
theological works deserve a separate volume of their own, since they rep-
resent a sustained area of Sara’s thought and study, and a distinct field of
inquiry requiring specialist presentation’, a specialist presentation which I
aim to offer (Criticism, p. xxxi). My overriding rationale is to bring Sara’s
religious writings, published and unpublished, into the foreground, to
show how she becomes a religious writer and her development in that
discipline. I refer, also, to Sara’s theorization, criticism and practice of
religious poetry in relation to the pre-Tractarian poetics of John Keble,
and Newman’s later Tractarian conception of didactic verse.
In my second chapter, I show how Sara’s early work, produced in a col-
laborative family setting, influenced her development as a writer whose
creativity thrives in dialogue with other writers and texts. In the mature
works of Sara’s final decade, the concept of dialogue permeates her ethic
22 R. SCHOFIELD
of religious discourse. As a protagonist in her Dialogues on

Regeneration remarks, echoing an aesthetic tenet of Keble’s, ‘the sub-
stance must determine the form’ if a work is to have ‘unity and symmetry’
(HRC). It is important, therefore, to examine the beginnings of Sara’s
literary career in family collaboration and textual dialogue. Dialogue is
Sara’s dominant literary mode from the outset, before it becomes her
vocational ethic. In Chap. 2, I discuss Sara’s earliest literary activity of
translation, begun as a family project, in which Uncle Southey was her
mentor and literary agent. I show how translation introduces Sara to
modes of textual dialogue and semantic negotiation, which become
important in her analysis of Biographia Literaria, and her later practice in
constructing polyphonic prose. My subsequent analyses of three poems
explore further how Sara’s authorship is rooted in the family community:
the poems directly address family members and engage in revisionary tex-
tual dialogue with her literary fathers. Two of the poems I examine
appeared in Sara’s volume Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children (1834)
and were written for her own children. I discuss Sara’s approach to poetry
in terms of Keble’s theories and practice, and consider the influence of
Keble’s poetics upon her criticism of religious poetry. I refer to Henry’s
role, like that of Southey earlier, as Sara’s sympathetic editorial reader and
literary agent in respect both of Pretty Lessons and Phantasmion, a fairy-
tale novel written initially for her children. I refer briefly to Phantasmion
in relation to Romantic influences upon Sara, and to the development of
her conception of authorship in the public sphere. I conclude Chap. 2 by
examining the editorial activities on which Sara was collaborating with
Henry while working on her poems for children and Phantasmion. Their
collaboration, on the fourth edition of STC’s Aids to Reflection (1839)
and the Literary Remains (1836–39), brings Sara into intensive creative
contact with STC’s religious philosophy: this leads directly to her first
intervention in the public sphere of theological controversy.
Sara’s extended essay ‘On Rationalism’ is the focus of my third chapter.
This religious work is unique in its innovative subversion of early Victorian
gender conventions: Sara infiltrates the male domain of academic theology
and engages the leading theologians of the day in polemical colloquy on
equal terms, in the ostensible cause of pious obedience as daughter and
widow. ‘On Rationalism’ reveals Sara to be working towards a dialogic
style in her polemical writing, in which she attempts to present the views
she opposes fairly, and to criticize the doctrine, not the writer himself, for
whom she maintains a tone of respect. I analyse Sara’s critique of Tractarian
theory, in which two dominant themes emerge: her view that Tractarianism
is elitist and authoritarian, resistant to dialogue; and that its tenets impose
arbitrary limitations on the boundlessness of God’s grace. A boldly origi-
nal work, ‘On Rationalism’ is in dialogue with STC’s Aids to Reflection
and appropriates key elements of his Christian philosophy to serve polemi-
cal ends.
Sara’s engagement with STC’s authorship is the subject of Chap. 4.
When the integrity of his philosophy is called into question by charges of
plagiarism, Sara undertakes to edit Biographia Literaria and examine the
evidence. This project is vital for the viability of her scheme to reconstruct
STC’s oeuvre to address the divisions of her own times, and for the recep-
tion of her original writings, in which she appropriates and develops his
philosophical ideas. Again, the family context—her roles as STC’s daugh-
ter and widow of his late editor—sanctions her authoritative incursion into
the male territory of academic philosophy. Sara’s editorship of Biographia
is a pivotal project for her: it brings into play her formative experience as a
translator, and requires her to analyse the textual structure of STC’s work,
which will influence her subsequent practice as an author of dialogic reli-
gious prose. I discuss Sara’s exposure of contradictions in STC’s authorial
theory and practice in relation to contemporary debates over literary
property. Sara analyses STC’s literary transgressions in textual, philosophi-
cal and psychological terms. Her academic methods reveal the evidence of
STC’s plagiarisms, and she exposes what she believes to be their underly-
ing cognitive and affective causes. Her strategy of openness seeks to pave
the way for a just evaluation of STC’s strengths, having closed down con-
troversy and speculation by candid exposure of his weaknesses. Also, in
exposing STC’s literary incapacities, Sara clears an authorial space for
herself.
My fifth chapter examines the development of Sara’s religious author-
ship in her ‘Introduction’ to Biographia 1847, her ‘Extracts from a New
Treatise on Regeneration’ (1848) and her ‘Note on the Confessions of an
Inquiring Spirit’ (1849). In Biographia 1847, Sara argues that STC’s
major achievement was his application of Kant’s critical philosophy to the
vindication of Christian faith. She again confirms that her priority in
encountering STC’s ideas is to apply them to the religious problems of her
own day. She engages with Newman on the contested doctrine of justifica-
tion, and concludes that the distinctions between Catholic and Protestant
versions of the doctrine are merely verbal. This anticipates her argument
in ‘Extracts’, that sectarian polemicists have a professional investment in
24 R. SCHOFIELD
creating and perpetuating controversy. Therefore, she contends, they

magnify minute distinctions between doctrines that are in fact fundamen-
tally similar. Their arrogant provocation of religious division is reflected in
flamboyant literary styles. Sara proposes, by contrast, a code of restrained
and cordial conduct for religious discourse. She adopts John Keble’s aes-
thetic criteria of reserve and plainness in her theory and practice of polem-
ical prose. In her ‘Extracts’, she engages in a poetic dialogue with Keble,
in which her tone and language are affectionate and reverent, exemplify-
ing the ethos of friendly respect that she advocates in religious discourse.
Her dialogue with Keble reflects her view that the development of
Christian doctrine is necessarily a communal and collaborative activity.
In Chap. 6, I discuss the ways in which Sara refines her dialogic meth-
ods of writing, first in the ‘Introduction’ to Essays on His Own Times
(1850), in which her argument for a Christian system of social justice is
presented in a polyphonic text, incorporating the voices of multiple
authors. Second, I discuss Sara’s use of Socratic dialogue in her unpub-
lished Dialogues on Regeneration, a substantial and strikingly original body
of work produced in the last two years of her life. In the Dialogues, Sara
creates a community of speakers, who span a wide spectrum of religious
and sectarian viewpoints. She exploits the Socratic form to demonstrate a
collaborative methodology in which characters progress collectively
towards a clearer conception of religious truth. I examine the role of Sara’s
women characters in the Dialogues, and discuss her subtle and subversive
treatment of the theme of gender in this work. The Dialogues abound in
genial humour and friendly interchange, suggesting that Christian fellow-
ship and heartfelt devotion transcend doctrinal and sectarian division. I
discuss the didactic poems that Sara includes in the Dialogues, and relate
her poetics to her views of Dante, Milton and Wordsworth. Ultimately,
the Dialogues reflect Sara’s vocational conception that the end of theologi-
cal discourse must be practical: to support and guide the Christian life. My
concluding chapter focuses on two complementary poetic responses by
Sara to STC, which elucidate the public and private dimensions of her
authorial vocation.
Notes
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. Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography (London:

Vintage, 2004), p. 39.
3. Kenneth Curry, Southey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 42.
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. Molly Lefebure, The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(London: Gollancz, 1986, p. 220).
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. Jeffrey W. Barbeau, ‘Sara Coleridge on Love and Romance’, The Wordsworth
Circle, 46 (2015), 36–44.
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. David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and
Henry Manning (London: Murray, 1966), p. 373.
10. ‘Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge’, Edinburgh Review, 139 (1874),
44–68 (p. 56, p. 61, p. 56).
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. The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria, WLMSA / Coleridge,
Sara / 78.
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. 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. 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. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 205, p. 230 n.
17. Alison Hickey, ‘“The Body of My Father’s Writings”: Sara Coleridge’s
Genial Labour’, in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and
26 R. SCHOFIELD
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. Dennis Low, The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2006).
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. Alan D. Vardy, Constructing Coleridge: The Posthumous Life of the Author
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
21. George Herring, What Was The Oxford Movement? (London: Continuum,
2002), pp. 17–18.
22. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part One, 1829–1850, 3rd edn
(London: SCM Press, 1997), p. 170.
23. Piers Brendon, Hurrell Froude and The Oxford Movement (London: Elek,
1974), p. 157.
24. Owen Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 29.
25. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology
(London: Verso, 2008), p. 236; Žižek’s emphasis.
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. Joanne E. Taylor, (Re-)Mapping the “native vale”: Sara Coleridge’s
Phantasmion’, Romanticism, 21 (2015), 265–279 (p. 276, p. 272).
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. Michael Macovski, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors and the
Collapse of Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
p. 3.
30. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury,
2013), p. 378.
31. Robert Piercey, The Crisis in Continental Philosophy: History, Truth and the
Hegelian Legacy (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 21–22.
32. F. J. A. Hort, ‘Coleridge’, Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the
University, 1856 (London: Parker, 1856), pp. 292–351 (p. 346).
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. ‘Tractarianism’ is an epithet commonly applied to the Oxford Movement
by contemporaries and subsequent generations.
35. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. by Marcus Weigelt (London:
Penguin, 2007), p. 52.
36. Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of
Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 232.
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. Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria WLMS A / Coleridge, Sara /
78; Sara’s emphases.
39. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Man and Women
of the English Middle Class, 1750–1850 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 33.
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. Jane Spencer, Literary Relations: Kinship and The Literary Canon 1600–
1830 (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 189.
42. Derwent Coleridge, The Scriptural Character of the English Church
(London: Parker, 1839), pp. xxiv–xxvii.
43. Nicola Healey, Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of
Relationship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 66.
44. Andrew Keanie, Hartley Coleridge: A Reassessment (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), p. 34.
45. Hartley Coleridge, New Poems, ed. by E. L. Griggs (London: Oxford
University Press, 1942), p. 69, l. 2.
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. 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
This section includes original writings by Sara Coleridge contained in editions of
S. T. Coleridge. Her major extended contributions to these editions are cited
individually.
Coleridge, Sara, Transcripts of unpublished letters in manuscript, various dates,
1820–1850, Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria, WLMS A / Coleridge,
Sara.
28 R. SCHOFIELD
———. 1847. Introduction. In Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of

My Literary Life and Opinions by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, second edition pre-
pared for publication in part by the late Henry Nelson Coleridge, completed and
published by his widow, 2 vols, I, pp. v–clxxxvii. London: Pickering.
———. 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.
———. 1850–51. Dialogues on Regeneration. Unpublished manuscripts in the
Sara Coleridge Collection, MS 0866, Harry Ranson Center, The University of
Texas at Austin.
———. 1873. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, Edited by Her Daughter, 2nd
edn, 2 vols, London: King.
———. 2007. Collected Poems, ed. Peter Swaab. Manchester: Carcanet.
———. 2012. The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought: Selected Literary Criticism,
ed. Peter Swaab. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
General Bibliography
Anonymous. 1874. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge. Edinburgh Review 139:
44–68.
Armstrong, Isobel. 1993. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London:
Routledge.
Barbeau Jeffrey W. 2006. Sara Coleridge the Victorian Theologian: Between
Newman’s Tractarianism and Wesley’s Methodism. Coleridge Bulletin, n. s. 28:
29–36.
———. 2014. Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
———. 2015. Sara Coleridge on Love and Romance. The Wordsworth Circle 46:
36–44.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Death of the Author. In Roland Barthes, Image Music
Text, ed. Stephen Heath, 142–148. London: Fontana Press.
Brendon, Piers. 1974. Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement. London: Elek.
Chadwick, Owen. 1990. The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1997. The Victorian Church, Part One, 1829–1850. 3rd edn. London:
SCM Press.
Coleridge, Derwent. 1839. The Scriptural Character of the English Church.
London: Parker.
Coleridge, Hartley. 1908. The Complete Poetical Works of Hartley Coleridge, ed.
Ramsey Colles. London: Routledge.
———. 1941. The Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs and G. E. Griggs.
London: Oxford University Press.
———. 1942. New Poems, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. London: Oxford University
Press.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed.
Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols, I. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71.
———. 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.
———. 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.
Curry, Kenneth. 1975. Southey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. 1997. Family Fortunes: Men and Women
of the English Middle Class, 1750–1850. London: Routledge.
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.
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.
Forster, Margaret. 2004. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography. London:
Vintage.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2013. Truth and Method. 2nd edn. London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
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.
Griggs, E.L. 1940. Coleridge Fille: A Biography of Sara Coleridge. London: Oxford
University Press.
Healey, Nicola. 2012. Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of
Relationship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hedley, Douglas. 2008. Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: ‘Aids to Reflection’ and
The Mirror of the Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herring, George. 2002. What Was The Oxford Movement? London: Continuum.
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.
Hort, F. J. A. 1856. Coleridge. In Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the
University, 1856, 292–351. London: Parker.
Jones, Kathleen. 1998. A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of
the Lake Poets. London: Virago Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Marcus Weigelt. London:
Penguin.
30 R. SCHOFIELD
Keanie, Andrew. 2009. Hartley Coleridge: A Reassessment of His Life and Work.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lefebure, Molly. 1986. The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
London: Gollancz.
———. 2013. Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner: Coleridge and His Children.
Cambridge: Lutterworth Press.
Low, Dennis. 2006. The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Macovski, Michael. 1994. Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors and the
Collapse of Romantic Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes. 1989. Sara Coleridge: A Victorian Daughter. Her Life
and Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Newlyn, Lucy. 2000. Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception.
Oxford: University Press.
Newsome, David. 1966. The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and
Henry Manning. London: Murray.
Piercy, Robert. 2009. The Crisis in Continental Philosophy: History, Truth and the
Hegelian Legacy. London: Continuum.
Poovey, Mary. 1984. 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.
Reed, Henry. 1937. The Daughter of Coleridge. In Sara Coleridge and Henry
Reed, ed. L.N. Broughton, 1–16. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Ruwe, Donelle. 2004. Opium Addications and Meta-Physicians: Sara Coleridge’s
Editing of Biographia Literaria. In Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections
of Romanticism, ed. Joel Faflak and Julie M. Wright, 229–251. New York: State
University of New York Press.
Showalter, Elaine. 1988. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists. In
The Theory of Criticism from Plato to the Present: A Reader, ed. Raman Selden,
537–541. London: Longman.
Spencer, Jane. 2005. Literary Relations: Kinship and the Literary Canon
1660–1830. London: Oxford University Press.
Stillinger, Jack. 1991. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Swaab, Peter. 2012. “The Poet and the Poetical Artist”: Sara Coleridge as a Critic
of Wordsworth. In Grasmere, 2012, Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer
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Taylor, Joanne E. 2015. (Re-)Mapping the “Native Vale”: Sara Coleridge’s
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Thomson, Heidi. 2009. The Construction of William Wordsworth in Sara
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London: Verso.
CHAPTER 2
Towards a Vocation of Religious Authorship:

Collaboration and Dialogue, 1818–1837
Southey’s Student and Collaborator: Sara

Coleridge as Translator
In this chapter I discuss the ways in which authorial strategies of collabora-
tion and dialogue were present from the earliest stages of Sara’s literary
activities. I consider how her early experience as a translator helped to
prepare her for significant later undertakings, and I analyse the elements of
dialogue in three poems from the early phase of Sara’s literary career,
before she committed herself to religious writing. As I will show, dialogue
in these poems takes place on two levels: first, in Bakhtinian terms, each of
these poems ‘enacts a poetics of dialogue’, in which ‘a mute listener …
stands as a figure for literary addressivity’; second, in her structural proce-
dures, Sara weaves into each text references to her literary fathers to
engage them in revisionary dialogue (Macovski, p. 19). I then consider
Sara’s initial steps towards her vocation of religious writing, and explore
the origins of her religious authorship in the collaborative project of edit-
ing STC.
Sara Coleridge’s first published works were translations. An Account of
the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, from the Latin of Martin
Dobrizhoffer was published in 1822 when Sara was aged nineteen. Her
second publication, in 1825, was a translation from early sixteenth-century
French: The Right Joyous and Pleasant History of the Feats, Gests, and
© The Author(s) 2018 33

R. Schofield, The Vocation of Sara Coleridge,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70371-8_2
34 R. SCHOFIELD
Prowesses of the Chevalier Bayard, the Good Knight without Fear and with-
out Reproach. John Murray published both of Sara’s translations, while the
translator herself remained anonymous. These projects enabled Sara to
engage in sustained literary activity compatible with the gender conven-
tions of her era. According to Lesa Scholl, translation was seen as ‘inferior
and derivative’, and therefore a socially acceptable pursuit for women.1
Previous commentators on Sara Coleridge accept the assumption that
translation is a subordinate literary activity. Kathleen Jones suggests that
the family endorsed Sara’s translation work for this reason: ‘[w]omen were
domestic beings’, Jones contends, ‘unsuited to public life, who might turn
a pretty verse or write romances, or even translate the work of great men
like Dobrizhoffer, so long as it did not interfere with the real [domestic]
business of their lives’ (Jones, p. 227). Jones’s ironic ‘great men’ implies
the female translator’s humble subservience. On the contrary, the literary
processes of translation are empowering, in ways which were of decisive
importance for Sara’s future literary activities. Gadamer regards transla-
tion as a hermeneutic activity: ‘a re-creation of the text’, an ‘interpreta-
tion, and not simply reproduction’. The translator, participating in a
creative activity of interpretation, exercises a significant measure of auton-
omy. Translation employs a dialogic procedure, according to Gadamer:
‘translating is like an especially laborious process of understanding’, he
observes,
in which one views the distance between one’s own opinion and its contrary
as ultimately unbridgeable. And, as in conversation, when there are such
unbridgeable differences, a compromise can sometimes be achieved in the
to and fro of dialogue, so in the to and fro of weighing and balancing pos-
sibilities, the translator will seek the best solution—a solution that can never
be more than a compromise. (Gadamer, p. 404)
Sara will analyse the compositional processes STC employs in ‘weighing

and balancing possibilities’ between his own words and ideas and those of
Friedrich Schelling; and she will undertake ‘laborious’ semantic negotia-
tions between various doctrinal viewpoints in her religious writings.
Susan Bassnett echoes Gadamer in describing translation as ‘an act of
creative rewriting’. Throughout Sara’s career, ‘creative rewriting’ is her
essential literary mode, in which she develops her authorial identity.2 It
also defines the compositional processes she finds in STC’s texts. Because
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Quite by chance, Cyprian glanced at the clock and remarked in startled
tones that it was past eleven.
"Is it?" she asked indifferently.
Her arms were clasped round her knees and her chin resting on them.
Sometimes she rocked herself gently backwards and forwards. He smiled to
himself, remembering the pose since she was seven.
"I am thinking it is about time I saw you home," he said. "Mrs.

Carmichael will be wondering what on earth we are doing."
"No she will not. There is no one at home, Cyprian, and I am not
expected back till to-morrow."
"But where have you arranged to spend the night?"
She gave that little shrug of the shoulders, once characteristic of

fourteen-year-old Ferlie shrugging the Inessential off her horizon.
"Here, I think," she said with wide eyes on the ruby coals.
Cyprian laughed. Then he protested, in his amusement, at the simplicity

of Ferlie grown-up. Presently, he sobered and began to attempt
explanations; to all of which she turned a dispassionately deaf ear.
"Come on, dear," said Cyprian at last.
"Where to?"
Driving it home that this unexpected arrival on his doorstep had, in very
sooth, been a Ferlie-esque escapade from which he must extricate her; if she
would lend herself to extrication. He was honestly puzzled.
Of course, he realized that, since they were Themselves, and not another
couple, her outlook was perfectly reasonable. Ferlie and he. A law unto
themselves long ago, when she awoke at night to scream because her
surroundings were dark and lonely. A law unto themselves when he
received her at the hands of Martha and Mary, mistrusters of men in
general, but willing to admit him into the fold on account of that farcical
avuncular status. A law unto themselves in their unnaturally unusual
correspondence with its sprawled confidences on one side and its restrained
admissions on the other of his need of her in the background of his life.
That need was within him still, but it must be his part to limit it now that
she was grown up: to take over the reins of friendship and—and normalize
it.
"Well, Cyprian," said Ferlie, quietly watching him, "are you, even now,
an occupant of a cage in the greater Zoological Garden, outside the walls of
which I promised you, a long while ago, that I always intended to remain?"
This was utter nonsense. Ferlie, with her talk of cages at fourteen, was
not to be encouraged, but Ferlie, holding similar views at eighteen, was,
most distinctly, to be brought up short.
He shifted the chair impatiently and she forestalled his reply.
"I suppose," she said, "that some buy their freedom in the course of
years with the big price of experience, but others are born free. If you have
not bought yours yet you will some day. But I was born free. Peter, too, I
think. He has the courage of his beliefs; he is no captive to past customs,
nor is the fear of the neighbour the beginning of his wisdom. If we walk
into cages it will be of our own free will, and not because any stale bait can
tempt us from within, nor any pursuing hounds scare us from without."
"Ferlie," said the bewildered man beside her, "will you please tell me
exactly what you mean?"
She shook a tangled lock out of her eyes and, at that moment, in the
gilding firelight, he had an odd fancy that a man might fill his hands with
sovereigns who had the courage to plunge them into her hair. Involuntarily,
he touched the ruffled rebellious head.
"You and I have always understood one another," he reminded her.
She imprisoned his fingers between her two soft palms.

"It is a good many years now, Cyprian, since you and I became friends.
Whenever I have had need of you and you could possibly reach me, you
have always come. We have had to face separation for what has seemed a
vitally long time to me since your last leave. To you, already mentally
settled and developed, it may not have seemed so long. But I have been half
afraid that your return would separate us more surely than, so far, has the
sea. To test that fear, I came to-night, because I have need of you, Cyprian.
To-night, not to-morrow. When I was little, what help could you have given
me by waiting for the daylight? I used to think you could save me from the
tomb which was all ready to close on me. Now it is a cage of which I am
afraid. I want to stay with you until that fear is past. I want to assure myself
of you; to re-learn you in the light of my increased knowledge of life. To-
night, not to-morrow. For to-morrow I have to make a decision concerning
that cage, and the decision depends upon what I may learn of you in the
little time we have together to-night. I knew how you would shrink from
offending Convention; therefore I have frustrated Convention. We have
only a few more free hours in which to pick up the threads which may have
got dropped and twisted. Upon the untangling of them rests my decision of
to-morrow. I have gone to sleep in your arms so often that it is a very
natural thing for me to remain beside you now until we can both sleep—at
rest, in one another's presence again. I need you, Cyprian, just now. And I
want you to realize just how much, or how little, you need me."
All but mesmerized, he listened. That which was hide-bound in him,

and entirely reticent British, put up a dull fight against the naked simplicity
of her words. He said weakly: "Dear, you are so young. You do not
understand."
"I understand 'What a Young Girl Ought to Know,'" and she bubbled
over with quick mockery. "Curiously enough, the knowledge neither
distresses nor shames me. This isn't the Victorian era. But all that I
understand, or misunderstand, about the threadbare 'Facts of Life,' affects
neither of us with regard to this situation. We have cherished our hours in
the past, scattered here and there, each like a desert oasis. We have come to
another now. Later, very much later, I think I shall probably fall asleep in
this chair and then you may cover me up and depart in peace, yourself, to
bed. And to-morrow we can breakfast somewhere together as if I had just
come upon the morning train and you had met me, and no one need hear
that we spent a happy night, or thereabouts, re-discovering one another."
Stirred to the depths and vexed with himself for his susceptibility to her
moods, Cyprian withdrew his hand into safety.
"You always had a way of making the unnatural seem perfectly natural
and ordinary."
"What forms your opinion on what is 'natural'?" asked Ferlle, abruptly.
His brain groped around in the dark awhile before he found an answer.
"There is a daimon in every man," he insisted in low tones, speaking

more to himself than to her, "which forces upon him the knowledge when a
thing is not Right, even though it may be Natural."
And then, that very daimon, thus invoked, spoke to him in the ensuing
silence.
The same child who had fallen asleep on his shoulder in the past was
beside him now, expectant of the same "crystallized apricot" of comfort. Let
him take heed that it was such comfort as healed and did not merely drug.
What, for all her dreams, could she have grasped of the Powers which spin
the dice for good or evil? Eighteen to thirty-nine! Supposing he yielded to
this childish defiance of the Unwritten Law and anyone came to know? He
got up and crossing to the window, flung it wide. The roar of London traffic
rushed upwards on the rising wind. He stood, his profile directed at the
struggling smoke-befogged stars; his shoulders, so moulded to desk-work, a
little bowed. Far below him, the haunches of a large black draught-horse
lumbered towards a mews. Its heavy deliberation touched a chord of
memory: a fragment of verse—Yeats, wasn't it?—assailed him in warning.
"The years like great black oxen plough the land, While God the
Ploughman gathers in" ... Gathers in ... Gathers in ... The grain?
There had been a clever fantastical novel he believed written round the
theme, and he had seen it filmed.
Someone in it had found the long-desired elixir of Youth.
At the time this had not seemed impossible, but now ... "While God, the
Ploughman..." Anyway, He did not hold back the great black oxen. The
inexorable ploughing, sowing and garnering must go on. Eighteen to thirty-
nine. How possible to take advantage of Ferlie's crystal faith and
unanalysed affection? If her words veiled the faint suggestion that her need
of him was as great as his need of her—wonderingly, reverently, he
repeated it to himself, "his need of her"—he must pretend, for the present at
any rate, that he did not hear it. He must be just to her Youth, that glorious
jewel of Life which she wore with such careless indifference.
"The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the
Herdsman goads them on behind."
That was it....
"Cyprian." Her voice brought him down from the clouds and he closed
the window with a slight sense of chill. "Cyprian, look at me."
He raised his eyes to hers, to drop them again immediately.
"Can you tell me, honestly," she asked him, "that you consider it would
be what is called a 'sin' for me to lean upon our friendship in the way I
choose, to-night?"
He shook his head at that but he would not answer.
"Cyprian, look at me." Nor would he do that again. His eyelids blinked
—their old short-sighted trick—over her head, at the sapphire resting
against her white throat, at the dying embers, at the hearth-rug where lay,
kicked free by its owner, a glass-buckled Cinderella shoe.
And she knew that she would be proved helpless against his refusal so
much as to look at his conception of the Forbidden Thing: for every flutter
of his eyelids was the drawing of a shutter which blocked from her another
window of his soul.
* * * * * *
"And now," said Cyprian at last, his voice dry with exhaustion, "Would
you mind going?"
Instantaneously, Ferlie turned her back and thrust her foot into the errant
shoe. In the doorway she faced him, her cloak over her arm.
"You have never asked that of me before," she said, "and you will never
be required to say it again."
Half paralysed he heard the front door bang. In another moment the
wave of reaction set in. What in thunder was he thinking of to allow her to
go out into Jermyn Street at this hour of the night, alone?
He snatched his hat and followed, gaining on her by the fact that he
could take the lift. She was passing under the stone arch leading to the
pavement as he crashed back the gates.
"Ferlie!" he called after her, "Wait." But she did not stop nor turn her
head at the sound of his footsteps hurrying along behind her. A taxi crawled
near with its flag up. He was just too late to prevent her getting into it. With
feverish presence of mind he noted the number. Fortune favoured him, for it
was caught in a block of cars returning from the theatres, as another car
ejected its passenger on the other side of the road.
Cyprian, too fiercely anxious at the moment to see the humour of the
situation, gave his penny-novelette directions. The driver awarded him an
indifferent glance and held out his hand for earnest money. He was used to
minding his own business in his profession.
Once in full pursuit of Ferlie's taxi Cyprian found himself on the verge
of unnatural mirth. His third night in England; and he and Ferlie playing
hide-and-seek, in and out of the London traffic, like any hardened human
satyr and some nymph of the by-streets. And why? What was this
intangible, invisible Thing which had suddenly interposed itself between
them? A silly whim on her part, an instinct-driven refusal on his and the
shadow had assumed these gigantic proportions.
Outside the Carmichaels' town residence, with its Sale-advertising
boards and closed blinds, Ferlie alighted.
From the prompt departure of her driver one might divulge that she paid
him without examining the fare. On her own front door-step, wrestling with
her latch-key, Cyprian reached her.
"Ferlie, don't be a little goose!"
Her eyes meeting his in the reflection of the street lamp were as hard as
pebbles.
"Only Beckett is here," she said, referring to the old butler, "and he has
put up the chain. Since you must let me in for a silly betrayal of my
unexpected return you had better come down into the basement and see if
you can hoist me through his bedroom window, if he sleeps with it open.
His room is next to the pantry and silver-chest. If I set an alarm going
accidentally, he will only think it is a burglar at last and plunge his head
further under the clothes."
"But, Ferlie——" She was half-way down the area steps and he, less
familiar with the house, followed stumblingly.
Beckett's window was open and quite near it stood a rain-barrel. She
tossed the cloak she had not troubled to put on into Cyprian's arms.
"I can't take that with me," she said, and, before he could recover his
breath to protest, she had reached the summit of the barrel. An instant she
swayed on the edge of it, balancing herself by means of a pipe running
down from the bathroom window. She was now only a shadowy shape
poised above him in the darkness.
"Somewhere," the coldly-spoken sentence stole down to him after she

drew herself up on to Beckett's window-ledge, "I have heard it said that 'to
the pure all things are impure.'"
The blank black square of her egress stared unfathomably back at

Cyprian, standing below it with the loose unfolded cloak, emptied of its
owner, in his arms.
CHAPTER VII
Her father said, "Well, if he is a decent chap, and Ferlie likes him, she is
lucky." Adding, a little later, from his pillows, his brow considerably
smoother than it had been for some time past, "At any rate, he will never
leave his wife a pauper."
Her mother said, "Oh, my darling! I always knew you'd come to see." ...
And aye had let the tears down fall in thanksgiving that there existed no
Jock o' Hazeldean to abstract the bride at the last moment.
Peter said, "There will be lots of girls ready to scratch your eyes out
with envy, Old Thing."
Lady Cardew said, "My dear, I thought from the very first that it was
Meant."
While, to Ferlie, Clifford said, "I was perfectly sure you would come
round in the end. I know women!"
And Beckett lost his bet with the cook; perhaps because he was less
inclined to put his head under the clothes at night than one might think.
Cyprian said nothing at all. He was, apparently, most tremendously

busy; though, as Mrs. Carmichael justly remarked, "One would have
imagined he would make an effort to come in, considering how interested
he had always been in dear Ferlie as a child."
Dear Ferlie as a woman was beginning to show herself a little

disconcerting. A dignified demeanour was all very well for one so soon to
wear the title of Lady Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, but this complete
aloofness to the arrival of satin-lined boxes and sealed wooden cases was
almost irritating. People were constantly coming up to the scratch, too, and
relations who, in the event of the prospective bridegroom's comparative
penury, would have considered pepper-pots quite suitable for the state of
life unto which it had pleased God to call Ferlie, were, in present
circumstances, producing eight-day clocks and jewellery.
Dear Clifford, also, was singularly blessed in a dearth of relatives who

would, otherwise, have been entitled to run appraising eyes over the girl
destined to assist him bear the burden of an ancient name.
"Not but that," as Ferlie's mother more than once pointed out to
congratulating friends, "the Carmichaels could hold their heads as high as
the Greville-Mainwarings in that respect." She trusted Lady Cardew had
rubbed it into the Duchess. The Duchess herself, a first cousin of Clifford's
father, emerged presently, from the mist of introductions, as an untidy,
acidly cheerful old lady, much more interested in horse-racing than in
Clifford; though she had been overheard to express a hope that his fiancée
had not bitten off more than she could chew. Which vulgarity reconvinced
Ferlie's mother that everybody in the Peerage had not got in, so to speak, by
the front door.
The Carmichaels were unmistakably "front door" people, even though

Ferlie's particular branch might remain collateral for some years to come in
default of railway accidents and infantile epidemics.
There was no earthly reason to delay the wedding. The doctors had not
made up their minds as to the date of Mr. Carmichael's operation and the
sooner his wife was free to devote all her energies to this decision the better.
Lady Cardew advised haste on account of her own private recollection

that Clifford had, more than once, been guilty of changing a matrimonially-
inclined mind. Had she imparted this news to Ferlie the latter might have
insisted on delay; at least until Cyprian should be completely out of her
range, in Burma. As it was, he received a silver-edged invitation to the
wedding with everybody else; though Mrs. Carmichael hoped to give him
to understand quite clearly that he had fallen from grace, when they met
face to face on the Day.
He had decided—nearly—to refuse it.
He had decided—nearly—that Ferlie could never have meant anything

at all by that most particularly Ferlie-esque mood.
He had decided—nearly—that he had done Right.
But the Daimon produced nothing to demonstrate that virtue brings its
own reward.
He had made two attempts to see Ferlie and arrive at some sort of an
explanation, but on each occasion she had deliberately frustrated him.
He had found it impossible to make his letter of congratulation anything

but stereotyped. Cyprian was not good at expressing himself except in
reports where exhaustive information was required in condensed form. It
would be more than necessary for him to send Ferlie a wedding present.
Nothing impersonal could prove of interest in the ancestral halls of

Mainwaring. Yet, there did not seem to be any personal message that Ferlie
would be likely to welcome from him at the moment. A younger man had
felt more cause for resentment, that Ferlie, during the short intimate
moments when she hailed their recovered friendship, had not confided in
him her intention of marrying this man. Cyprian was, himself, incapable of
resentment against her, however well-deserved.
By chance, he caught sight of something in a jeweller's window which

attracted him for unanalysable reasons: it was a small golden apple attached
to a slender gold chain. By means of a catch, cunningly concealed under the
leaf, it split in half, revealing a tiny magnifying mirror and a minute
powder-puff. Round the mirror was engraved the legend, "To the Fairest."
Cyprian bought the apple, caused it to be packed and sealed, and wrote
the address in the shop; whence he despatched it to Ferlie, omitting even to
enclose his card.
She did not acknowledge it but, at least, she did not send it back.
* * * * * *
With the dawning of her wedding day a fatalistic calm descended upon
his tortured mentality, preparing him to see the thing decently through.
On account of Mr. Carmichael's illness the ceremony and reception

were to be comparatively "quiet." But when Cyprian arrived, in response to
exultant bells, at the fashionable church's door, whence a strip of red carpet
protruded like a derisive tongue, his muffled senses perceived quite a
formidable array of guests in wedding-garments who ostensibly came to
pray and remained to stare.
An immaculate gentleman, blandly manipulating yards of scarlet cords

suggestive of a royal lynching, inquired of him, "whether he were on the
side of the bride or the bridegroom," and, receiving an inarticulate reply,
pushed him into the end of the last pew and left him to his own devices with
a hymn-book.
The organ blared joyously, as if the organist aimed at drowning the

torrent of whispering and the squeaks of enraptured greeting uniting the
pews.
Here and there, was a face known to Cyprian through the medium of the
illustrated papers.
Fragments of conversation were wafted backwards through the lily-

scented air.
"The mother really landed him, I believe."
"Yes, the Glennies are furious, and Mona Glennie says..."
"But he was never actually engaged to her, was he?"
"Wild oats. What young man doesn't... No. The Vane girl was older than
he was. The attraction at that establishment was the Samaritan Actress."
"Well, it's the first time I have heard a member of the tribe of Abraham
described as a Samaritan."
"You don't understand. Why, she took in the Vane when all doors..."
Cyprian sat back and opened the hymn-book at random. Did he feel
things more intensely than these folk and was it a disgrace to be thin-
skinned?
Muriel, and now ... Ferlie. "The One before the Last." But Muriel had
figured in the life of a different man from the Cyprian who sat here
watching for Ferlie. If intense desire could be construed by the high gods
and accepted as prayer, he did most intensely desire Ferlie to be happy.
The buzz of conversation thickened into low murmurings and died. The
bridegroom had entered by a side door and was speaking to someone in a
front pew.
Almost immediately the Voluntary changed to Lohengrin's "Wedding

March," and a clump of rose-coloured dresses, presumably belonging to
bridesmaids in the porch, took individual form and clustered round
someone in white.
From his post at the back Cyprian had not been able to gather more than
that Ferlie's future husband was tall and rather thin but, on turning his head
now, his eyes encountered hers fully. He was startled by the impression that
he was staring into the face of a perfect stranger. How ghastly white she
looked! The fraction of a moment and the eyes dropped, even as his own
had dropped before hers the night she had wished to keep him at her side.
She was passing by on Peter's arm. The pair of them looked as if they
ought still to be going to school.
Peter's face wore precisely the same expression as must have adorned it
when he first took his place at roll-call among the sixth-form "Bloods."
The bridesmaids twittered behind large bouquets of sweet-peas.
Everybody was standing. Everybody was howling a hymn, what time all
craned their necks and stealthily mounted hassocks to stare at Ferlie ...
Ferlie, who hated people to see her at emotional moments.... He would
wake in a little while to find her beside him, seeking shelter from the Thing
which had whitened her face with terror....
"Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God..." Ah,

well, if the man thought so.
Cyprian felt certain that, whatever God had seen fit to do in Cana of
Galilee, He was not presiding amongst these wedding-guests.
Every now and then a gap in the swaying pews would give him a
glimpse of Ferlie's mother dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, in token
that she must be regarded as bereft of a daughter against her will. At
intervals, she was, doubtless, thanking God that she had done her duty.
Cyprian again sought refuge in the hymn-book.
The mutterings up at the altar were stilled and various people had
escaped from confinement to wander through the vestry-door in the wake of
the chief actors in this religious farce. Or was it tragedy?
While bitter thought was crowding thus against bitter thought in his
mind, his gaze became involuntarily fixed upon the lines of the hymn the
choir was singing to fill in time:
"O Perfect Love, all human thought transcending!

Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy Throne,
That theirs may be the love that knows no ending
Whom Thou for evermore doth join in one."
But—Good Gracious!—thought Cyprian, in the light of blinding revelation,

he and Ferlie did not need all this to make them one. They had always
known that they were one, united by some mystic Force which had its roots
in a Far Beginning and its branches in the Eternities.
Then why were they building these barriers deliberately between them
and their united freedom?
"With childlike trust which fears not pain nor death."

He had missed the rest of the second verse, but that last line was a perfect
description of Ferlie's approach to Love in the abstract. (The woman in
front of him would not stop sniffing.)
"Grant them the joy which brightens earthly sorrow,

Grant them the peace which calms all earthly strife;
And to Life's day the glorious unknown morrow
That dawns upon eternal love and life...."
It was over. In a dream he had seen her flit by him, glancing neither to
the left nor to the right, but this time she was not clinging to Peter.
With her departure the church became a happy tumult of rising sound.
The organist had pulled out everything in the diapason line that his fingers
could reach, and Cyprian escaped along the flower-strewn carpet, and so to
his taxi, with a great longing upon him for the silence of catacombs.
The philosophic sensations which had followed his sleepless night were
no proof now against his throbbing nerves. Ferlie, also, he remembered,
experienced physical suffering in mental sorrow. The knowledge formed
another of the cobweb-threads binding them to one another.
In Mrs. Carmichael's drawing-room people were now shaking hands

with her. There was more noise and a great deal of affected laughter.
Cyprian, avoiding the Family, including the uplifted Peter, slipped into an
ante-room in search of whisky and soda.
He could not face Ferlie before all that crowd. He could not.
From the ante-room he made his way to an apartment containing a bowl

of goldfish. He remembered it commanded a view of the stairs. If she
passed up or down the staircase, unattended, he might reasonably expect to
have her for a moment to himself. He waited for a long while, watching the
goldfish go round and round in circles. They roused misty recollections of
Ferlie's nonsensical talk of the general imprisonment of human spirits.
When she did come, although she passed right through the room in her
white veil and flowing draperies, he nearly failed to step forward from that
sheltered corner by the bookcase.
"Ferlie!"
She started violently and swung round.
"Oh! It's you, is it?"
She spoke on a high-pitched delirious note. Naturally, people were

agreeing any girl would be over-excited who had achieved this marriage.
Her whole appearance shocked Cyprian, who knew the real Ferlie.
"I never acknowledged your gift, Cyprian. The Apple of Discord.

Clever of you to think of that. Not that I needed a material reminder of the
fact that you and I had at last experienced ... shall we call it a
misunderstanding?"
The words raced one another to a close, and she ended on the edge of
shrill laughter. He flinched as if she had struck him in the face.
The tale of their years for that instant reversed, he looked back at her
with the eyes of a hurt and bewildered child. Shaded them with his hand
against the pain as he replied:
"You know that is neither fair nor true."
"I no longer know what is true," said Ferlie.
Half beside himself with the sight of her thus altered, he caught her
wrists and held them.
"Because you have formed a new and all-absorbing tie for the future, is
it necessary to mock at that older discarded friendship which stretches out a
hand to you from the past?"
A slow flush crept up her face and the grey eyes widened on a look of
anger and intense pain.
"Mock? No, Cyprian, I am not Muriel Vane—kind to men in order to be

cruel. If I seem to indulge in that particular vein of cruelty, it is because I
know of no other way to be kind ... now."
He saw the thin gleam of a gold chain which lost itself in the folds of
transparent softness near her throat, and was superseded by a visible string
of pearls—"the gift of the Bridegroom."
Then she wrenched herself away and left him there, staring
uncomprehendingly at the goldfish going round and round.
CHAPTER VIII
Cyprian did not return to the flat. He went out into the restless London
streets. Block after block he passed, from the more fashionable quarters to
the outskirts of the park, walking swiftly to escape pursuing Memory, until
at last the damp darkness of the river divided the myriad scintillating eyes
of the city.
Further along the Embankment dead forms lay huddled where the
shadows lay deepest, every now and again to start erect, galvanized into life
by the angry flash of a police-lantern.
As he paused to strike a match against a stone bench, shaped like an

incompleted coffin, one of these corpses twitched itself upright.
"Fit ter drop!" it muttered, still in the throes of uneasy slumber; "Gawd!
fer one bloody night to fergit meself in."
Cyprian replaced his pipe in his pocket and fumbled.

"Here," he said, "I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I
am, but if you, too, are in need of sleep and a little forgetting, go and buy it
with this, which will not buy it for me."
With the astonished gratitude of a "Gawd bless yer bleedin' eyes,

Gov'ner" (even here it was God, God, God, thought Cyprian, who refused to
be shut out of Man's tortured intellect even while it anathematized His
works) this invisible wreck of Humanity, made in His image, slouched
away to drink itself blind to sorrow for a short time in some starless rat-hole
known only to its kind.
And Cyprian sat and smoked on the deserted seat, still redolent with the
effluvia of rotting rags, until a suspicious arc of light searched him out in
his sins and a voice, hoarse with hectorings, commanded him to move on.
Morning found him so far from home that a sleepy taxi-driver whom he
hailed rolled a jaundiced eye on receiving the directions of this individual
whose damp, crumpled clothes and unclean collar showed unmistakable
evidence of an unusual brand of night-on-the-tiles, and Cyprian was obliged
to disburse half the fare in advance.
His physical exhaustion stood him now in good stead and he slept
deeply on the shabby leather cushions the whole way back to the flat. Slept
again on his undisturbed bed, afterwards, till the scandalized valet roused
him for tea; his first meal in twenty-four hours.
Before he set sail for the East, he made one attempt, and only one, to
renew correspondence with Ferlie.
The letter conveyed nothing to her of the true state of his mind. In
despair he had closed it on a pathetic admission, "I fear I have no gift of
expression." She answered him, but her own methods of expression were,
as usual, fantastic. In the letter she enclosed a small gold key. "A gift for a
gift, Cyprian. I suppose it was inevitable that you should shut the gates
upon me. I send the sign that only you can unlock them."
He placed the key upon his watch-chain, and, with Herculean efforts of
self-control, refrained from any attempts to discover her meaning.
She had always been such a rebel; she had always been so sure of the
light within her and, alas, she had always been so sure of the light within
him.
A few weeks later, when, the honeymoon accomplished, Ferlie and her
husband had returned to town, Mr. Carmichael died.
The operation proved successful enough but, somehow, he never really

rallied. Perhaps the predominant feeling that his day's work was now ended
lessened the incentive to live.
He smiled with grim satisfaction the afternoon Peter came to see him; a
Peter who had already begun to regard the Human Form Divine in the same
light as the Butcher regards the liver and kidneys which he slaps down upon
the marble slab to dissect for purchasing housewives; a Peter who would be
decidedly happier using the knife than saving the unwary limb that might
stray his way.
Peter's hair was untidy, his eyes bloodshot, his collar unhygienic, and
his finger-nails in half-mourning. His appearance was altogether
unsterilized and self-assured. He cried, with a loud voice. His opinions on
certain experimental operations, his criticisms on those neighbouring
embryo surgeons at work on the same yellow preserved leg as himself, his
versions, punctuated with spasms of hearty merriment, of the latest hospital
yarn, portraying his fellow-students as a set of inquisitive young ghouls
more triumphant over an eminent physician's sponge forgotten in a victim's
intestines than troubled with sympathy for the latter's bereaved relatives.
"And I'll tell you exactly what they did to you, Father; it's old Gumboil's
favourite amusement. First he cuts open the..."
"Peter, I am surprised at you!" broke in his horrified mother.
Thus had the path of Peter been made smooth and his way plain by
Ferlie's brilliant marriage.
"I staked little enough on her," said Mr. Carmichael, relishing the jest of
Martha and Mary's antiquated establishment. "Your mother was mistrustful
of education for her own sex; she did quite well for herself without it, didn't
she? Ferlie seems to have justified the conviction that the old-fashioned girl
gets the matrimonial plums. At any rate, you will owe your sister a good
deal. See that she stays happy."
Of his son-in-law, whom he only saw once, he said very little.
"Impossible to judge them by the young men of my day. This type did
well enough in the War crisis."
He did not leave his wife badly off. With Peter on the way to being
floated, and Ferlie secure, she had her widow's pension to herself, besides a
little private means and the sum the big town-house eventually fetched
when Ferlie bought it, pandering to a dream of her mother's that Peter might
one day practise there and retain the Carmichael traditions in the old setting.
Till that satisfactory day it could nearly always be sub-let.
Somewhat doubtful of the Christian aspect of her husband's expressed

desire for cremation Mrs. Carmichael, while respecting his wishes,
determined that the rest of the funeral obsequies should be sufficiently
orthodox to disarm his Creator.
"No proper tombstone, you see," she complained damply to Ferlie. "The
design should, so obviously, have been a severe cross, quite plain, with
perhaps a weeping angel praying. Then a dove of peace hovering, and
maybe a few lilies. The simpler the better, you know. And a scroll at the
foot, or an open book with one of those grand old texts—Isaiah, is it, or
Ecclesiasticus?—anyway, one of the Prophets—'Fear not for I have
redeemed thee.' So comforting. Or else the one about panting for living
waters that always makes me feel thirsty myself. Your dear father was so
fond of rhetoric."
Ferlie, not quite sure whether the weeping angel was destined to wear a
delicate semblance to the bereaved wife, nor convinced that the cross could
be considered suitably symbolic of the faith of one who had ever regarded it
as the undeserved gibbet, brought upon him by himself, of a well-meaning
Eastern agitator nearly two thousand years ago, was inclined to demur.
"Father never evinced either the slightest fear of his condemnation
hereafter, nor any faith in an ultimate redemption," she protested, "and I
think it would have been rather hypocritical to parade a thirst for living
waters after death in anyone who can hardly be described as having gasped
for them during life."
Then, responding to her mother's grievously shocked demeanour, she

relented into explanation.
"I think I never admired Father so much in his life as I did at his death.
He closed his eyes, restfully and unfearingly, upon the consciousness of
work well done and principles truly upheld. What business is it of ours if
they were mistaken principles? So many people, who profess to cling to the
creeds supported by the Churches, live as if they had none, and then drift
out on a tide of terrified remorse and shame. But, personally, I would not
feel fit to intercede for Father's 'forgiveness,' if he really requires to be
forgiven for being true to his lights."
Ferlie's mother was too religious to see it, and, since it seems to follow
that the brighter the hope of Eternal Life, the blacker the garb in which it
must be approached, there was much melodious moaning at the bar when
her husband's ashes were interred upon the shores of that Eternal Sea which
brought us hither and upon which, in imagination, she had safely launched
his sceptical soul.
A week later she was still sewing bands of crepe on to Peter's various
coats and seeking consolation in those little details of mournful respect she
was able to accord her Dead.
* * * * * *
In due course, Aunt Brillianna, returning from the uttermost ends of

Italy, was overwhelmed by the volume of water which had poured under the
Family Bridge during her inexcusable retirement.
As the younger relatives, who had expectations at her hands, remarked:

"Anything might have happened to her at her time of life." Why, Death had
happened to her nephew!

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The Vocation of Sara Coleridge:

Authorship and Religion 1st Edition

How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures Robin Dunbar

Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years 2nd Edition

Duty to Self Assistant Professor Of Philosophy Paul

Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of

Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities Marcel

On the Politics of Ugliness 1st ed. Edition Sara

The Handbook of Religion and Communication 1st ed

The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Samuel Taylor

The Vocation of Sara

ISBN 978-3-319-70370-1 ISBN 978-3-319-70371-8 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964552

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustation: Brian Jackson / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Oxford, UK Robin Schofield

This book has its origins in gatherings of The Friends of Coleridge, at

I would like to thank Jeff Cowton for enabling me to consult tran-

1 Introduction: Sara Coleridge and the Contexts

2 Towards a Vocation of Religious Authorship:

3 ‘On Rationalism’: ‘The Authoritative Word’ and ‘Liberty

4 Biographia 1847: Plagiarism, Literary Property

5 The Theory and Practice of Polemical Writing: Religious

6 Authorial Vocation and Literary Innovation, 1850–1851 183

7 Conclusion: Public Renewal, Personal Redemption 227

ARCC Aids to Reflection, ed. by John Beer, The Collected

Essays Essays on His Own Times: Forming a Second Series of the

Routledge. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton

Introduction: Sara Coleridge

Innovation and Subversion

Irenia: How is it, Mr Thychnesse, that you have quite deserted

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Sara presents an egalitarian model of discourse in which dialogue collapses

exponents, therefore, reject engagement in dialogue, expressed by

to the politico-theological disruptions of her times. In doing so, she

‘[T]he Thoroughness of [Southey’s] Instruction’:

Relative to the common experience of middle-class women in the early

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Studies

authorship’ in terms of a feminine ideal. He refers to the ‘maidenly mod-

Twenty-First-Century Editions and Studies

exploitation of STC’s metaphysics in her later religious writings. Because

which he correctly notes an ‘ambivalence’, in which Sara acknowledges

analysis. Žižek’s Marxist ideology, adapted to what he terms ‘postmodern

Theorizing Sara Coleridge

ceptualizations of the relationships of texts, contexts and authors. Indeed,

In contrast to the ‘already found, ready made’ truisms established by

primacy of dialogue and the structure of question and answer’.30 Bakhtin

[T]he horizon of the present is continually in the process of being formed

In the foregoing sections I have noticed some salient points of my Father’s

neglects to relate this to the Neo-Platonic strands of his thought. Sara’s

Sara Coleridge and Gender: Preliminary Perspectives

Newlyn comments that Romantic women writers ‘frequently collapsed the

begun in collaboration with her husband, enables her to collapse the

Sara Coleridge’s Anxious Brothers

Literary Dialogue and Religious Polemics:

I do not aim to present a comprehensive survey of Sara Coleridge’s whole

Oxford, UK Robin Schofield

1 Introduction: Sara Coleridge and the Contexts

2 Towards a Vocation of Religious Authorship:

3 ‘On Rationalism’: ‘The Authoritative Word’ and ‘Liberty

4 Biographia 1847: Plagiarism, Literary Property

5 The Theory and Practice of Polemical Writing: Religious

6 Authorial Vocation and Literary Innovation, 1850–1851 183

7 Conclusion: Public Renewal, Personal Redemption 227