Anya Taylor. Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law against Divorce. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN: 1-4039-6925-6. Price: £35/US$65.

Anya Taylor’s lively and erudite Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780-1830 (1999) made us rethink drunkenness in the Romantic period; her new book about Coleridge recharges the study of this poet with equal vigour by moving away from an emphasis on the poet’s paralyzing laudanum addiction, debilitating depression, and his sublimation of vaguely unrequited love into abstruse musings. Instead the focus is on “the man of joy, whose energy radiates outward to all his activities, the precocious and passionate lover, the devoted observer of women” (1); in other words the man of flesh and blood who was “’very fond of earth,’ very fond of dinner, sex, and drink” (7). The affirmative emphasis on Coleridge as an individual explains that less attention is paid to the intricacies of Coleridge’s eroticized relationship with the extended Wordsworth household as a whole. My only regret is the simplification of two key players, Robert Southey and Sara Fricker: I believe that the argument of the physical, earth-bound Coleridge would have been stronger if he had been portrayed less like a sacrificial victim in his interactions with these two characters who are reduced to two caricatures in an otherwise so humane book. While each of the ten chapters of the book can easily be read separately for Taylor’s astute insights on Coleridge’s diverse, exuberant expressions about his responses to female bodies and voices, delicate issues of reputation, women’s education, property ownership, and marriage and its legislation, the book does follow a roughly biographical trajectory which, after an initial section on first loves, mainly centers on the crucial mistake in Coleridge’s life, his hasty dutiful marriage to Sara Fricker and his passionate, reciprocated love for Sara Hutchinson in a country where divorce was illegal. Chapters 9 and 10 also explore Coleridge’s involvements, in the wake of the 1810 loss of “the infinitely beloved darling” Sara Hutchinson, with a wider community of women, including Mary Morgan and her sister Charlotte Brent, and then from 1816 onwards, Anne Gillman and her circle. The movement which Taylor traces with great acumen and sensitivity extends from the passionate, more youthful, centre of Coleridge’s experience into the more rational realm of advice in later life, “from relishing the particularity of young women, to swooning at women’s voices sung and spoken, to sympathizing with women’s unique ordeals, to reverencing them as individuals, to forecasting a better civilization that would provide them with spheres for free agency” (185). The main strength of this engaging, readable book is the gusto which Taylor herself brings to her reading of Coleridge and which she extends into her perception of the whole period. For those of us who might still associate the Romantics with a certain spiritual puritanism, all plain living and hard thinking, she redresses the physicality of the period and its fashions by reminding us of the “eye-catching décolletages at the Bath Fashion Museum” (43) when writing about the young Coleridge’s involvement in fashionable life, full of exposed flesh and flimsy dresses, during the 1797-1802 Morning Post years. Her joyful approval of Coleridge’s appreciation of physicality (“Women are bright eyefuls and warm armfuls. He notices their heft, dress or undress, and foibles”) is matched by her cogent understanding of not only the poetry but also the notebooks and letters (12). Coleridge, considering his own lifelong obsession with the importance of a unified One Life, could not have asked for a better reader for this main reason that Taylor, whose own writing enhances the physicality of Coleridge’s texts, never loses sight of Coleridge’s reverence for the whole individuality of the other person. As in her …