It’s funny how context and history change perception. Before I read Annette Vallon, William Wordsworth was simply a poet that I loved for his affinity to Nature, for the unrestrained passion pouring into his verse. After reading this historic fiction, carefully told by Tipton, I cannot help but notice a constriction in Wordsworth’s verses that I never noticed before, a catch in the throat that checks a person from speaking straight from the heart, and a slightly querulous limp in his laments of foregone Youth.
The heroine, on the other hand, shines in the novel against the wider backdrop of the French Revolution. Of course, it’s important to bear in mind that Tipton’s storytelling, although compelling, has woven a version of reality from selected phrases in letters, fragments of history, and faded parchments of verse, with the hypersensitive imagination of a researcher trawling the stacks in a university library. In actuality, not much is known about Mme Annette Vallon except that she was Wordsworth’s French lover with whom he had a little girl named Caroline Wordsworth. The English Channel and repeated wars separated the two, and a decade later, Wordsworth went on to Mary, a Mary Hutchinson he wed in 1802.
Tipton’s portrayal of the puritan influence of Wordsworth’s cherished sister, Dorothy, leaves a sour taste of cowardice and lack of will in the character of the celebrated poet. The frightful anecdotes of the French Revolution also impress upon me just how horrific Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was. The valor with which Annette Vallon survived the perpetual separation from Wordsworth and faced the French Revolution endears this mysterious figure to the heart. And when you reach the final page, you may very well feel impelled to launch into a close reading of Wordsworth’s works in attempts to discern a reference here or a line there alluding to this love he left behind.
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