Vital Stream

A work of historical fiction, an experiment in life writing and a verse drama designed to be read aloud. Vital Stream takes the form of a long sonnet sequence, revisiting six extraordinary months in 1802 - a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Parted when they were very young, the siblings had eventually set up home together in the Lake District, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. After two years in Grasmere, William became engaged to Mary Hutchinson. There followed an intense period of re-adjustment for all three, and for his former lover Annette Vallon, who had borne him a daughter he had never met. During 1802 the Wordsworth siblings wrote some of their most beautiful work; these were their last months of living alone, and their writing has an elegiac quality. Their journey to see Annette Vallon and meet William's daughter for the first time took them through London to Calais during the brief Peace of Amiens, involving a careful dissociation from his past. Other complications coloured their lives, to do with Coleridge and his failing marriage. Lucy Newlyn draws all this material into the vital stream of her sequence. PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE WORDSWORTH TRUST

Lucy Newlyn was born in Uganda and grew up in Leeds. She read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she also studied for her D. Phil, going on to become Lecturer then Tutorial Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She taught English at St Edmund Hall for thirty-two years, published widely on English Romantic poetry, became a Professor in 2005 and retired in 2016. In addition to four books with Oxford University Press and (as editor) The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, she has published two collections of poetry: Ginnel (Oxford Poets, Carcanet, 2005) and Earth's Almanac (Enitharmon, 2015). Newlyn's literary biography, William and Dorothy Wordsworth 'All in Each Other' (OUP, 2013) was chosen as a TLS Book of the Year. Her memoir Diary of a Bipolar Explorer was published in 2018 with Signal, and her book The Craft of Poetry (written entirely in verse) is forthcoming with Yale University Press. She now lives and writes in Cornwall.