Biography II

In her transition from her works such as "As Observacaoes" (The Observations) to her sonnets, the typical criticism to have emerged since Wattman ascribes the shift to her maturity. Of course, she herself would deny this several times in the interviews and manuscripts that arose after the heyday of Wattman's school of Insistentialism had petered out. But even years before that, lines from her verse play "Taxonomies" exhibit her disdain for the very notion of maturity, claiming: "Maturity results from matters-at-hand, bureaucracy, / And all of the prejudice the rear guard maintains" (Taxonomies III, i, 97-8). Her mind, like her poetry but unlike her prose, wrote en plein air, imposing her memory on the nature around her. In fact, all three of her own personal copies of Wordsworth's "Preludes" (one each for 1799, 1805, and 1850) are ferociously annotated. All the references to what she called "infancy, insouciance and incest" are covered in inkblots.