SOURCE: Meiners, Katherine T. “Reading Pain and the Feminine Body in Romantic Writing: The Examples of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge.” The Centennial Review 37, no. 3 (fall 1993): 487-512.

In the following essay, Meiners considers the role of the experience of suffering in the creation of meaning and selfhood for Romantic writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth.

I

Romantic Encounters with illness and pain precipitate crises of intelligibility, moments when intense pain makes a sufferer unintelligible to others as much as to herself. The nineteenth-century witnesses an increased tendency to professionalize such suffering and turn pain into an event to be objectified and co-opted by other intelligibilities, including those of poetry and medicine. This essay will address Romantic understanding as a complex cultural practice greater than the making of literature which is inclined to seek its remedies for human suffering outside the medical disciplines as much as within them.

The experience of...