ABSTRACT
The incomplete 'Recollections of the early life of Sara Coleridge, Written by herself, were published in the Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge edited by her daughter Edith in 1873, and addressed to her in the form of a letter. Edith, however, omitted certain parts of the manuscript, especially a passage critical of the Wordsworths' untidy household. The full manuscript is held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and reprinted by Bradford Keyes Mudge in his Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter (Yale University Press, 1989). Sara (1802-52), 'a poor little, delicate, low-spirited child', as she describes herself, was the youngest child of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born at a point when his marriage to Sara Flicker was already as good as over. Although she saw little of her father in childhood, she devoted much of her adult life to editing his work and safeguarding his reputation. He wrote of her in 1808; 'she has the sweetest Tongue in the world - she talks by the hour to me in bed' (Mudge, p. 261). Married to her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge (d. 1843) in 1829, she suffered recurrent bouts of nervous illness, exacerbated by constant pregnancies and the deaths of all but two of her children, Herbert and Edith. Even in this childhood memoir, she returns several times to her brothers' physical superiority to herself, as well as her own failure to meet with adult approval. At the same time she is proud of her delicate looks, her physical agility, and large blue eyes. She was, in fact, a precocious intellectual, who began her literary career helping her brother Derwent with difficult translation work from Latin and medieval French. Her own publications included Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children (1834) and Phantasmion (1837), a fairy tale with lyrics. She died of breast cancer which was allowed to develop without adequate treatment.
