(Download) "Anya Taylor. Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, And the Law Against Divorce (Book Review)" by Studies in Romanticism ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Anya Taylor. Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, And the Law Against Divorce (Book Review)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 178 KB
Description
Anya Taylor. Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 219. $74-95. In Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce (now in its second printing) Anya Taylor's aim is two-fold. First, she wishes to evoke from Coleridge's love poetry, much of it appearing for the first time in J. C. C. Mays's recent Poetical Works, a heretofore "overlooked" master love-poet and Dionysian "man of joy, whose energy radiates outward to all his activities, the precocious and passionate lover, the devoted observer of women" (i). Second, she wishes to defend Coleridge against long-standing charges of cowardice and fecklessness for not seeking a divorce when it was clear that his marriage to Sarah Fricker had become a loveless wreck and he had fallen deeply in love with Sara Hutchinson, soon to become Wordsworth's sister-in-law. Taylor achieves her second aim by spelling out the legal impediments and practical impossibility of obtaining a divorce in the England of Coleridge's day, and the chapter in which she does so surpasses every other legal analysis of this sad topic. She succeeds as well in her first aim, but her avowed partiality for her subject leaves us with a portrait in which the darkness of Coleridge's lapses of character in sexual matters is often lost in Taylor's incandescent enthusiasm for his erotic joie de vivre. Nonetheless, she offers perceptive and original interpretations of the poetry that anyone teaching or writing about it will be obliged to take into account.