Jonathan Wordsworth


Jonathan Fletcher Wordsworth was an English academic, literary critic and expert on the Romantic era in literature.

Life

He was a great-great-great nephew of William Wordsworth and the great-great-grandson of Christopher Wordsworth, the younger brother of the poet and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an authority on the work of William Wordsworth on whom he concentrated the bulk of his academic writings.
He was educated at Westminster School and Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1957 he became a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, where there is now a postgraduate scholarship in his name. He was later Professor of English Literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford.
His students at Oxford included Martin Amis, Christopher Reid, Craig Raine, Nicholas Roe, N. W. O. Royle, and Robert J.C. Young. He was the Chairman of the Wordsworth Trust and its President thereafter. He left behind three wives − the literary theorist Ann Wordsworth, Lucy Newlyn, Professor of English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Jessica Prince; and seven children − four with Ann and three with Jessica including Helen, Giles and Teddy.
His work appeared in the London Review of Books.

Works

His many critical pieces, innovative editions and books on his famous relative include: