What do the existing letters from Annette Vallon to William Wordsworth suggest about the dynamics of their relationship?
They show us a woman distraught over whether her lover and father of her infant daughter will return to her. They show us the universal of a woman and a mother stuck within the awful uncertainties of a world at war. It is a tremendous risk for William to take if he comes back to France. So Annette asks him when he will return; then immediately says that he better not. We can feel her aching heart when she says that the baby looks more like him every day, and that when she holds the child in her arms she can imagine it is he whom she is holding. These letters of course imply an intimacy between them, an intimacy that belongs to letters between husband and wife or the deeply committed; they certainly imply that he had planned to come back when he left. William tells us in The Prelude that he only left “dragged by the chain of harsh necessity.” The letters are all the more poignant because we realize we are reading words intended for William, which he himself never read, for they were imp
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