The extreme attachment of Renan to his sister Henrietta and of Wordsworth to his sister Dorothy had much to do with the nature of the literary work of these men. The attachment explained from the point of view of psychoanalysis amounts to this. The affection which each man has for his mother is transferred to the sister who is the nearest resemblance to the mother. This new fixation may remain too long and the man hence loves no other woman. The affection is usually at its height in youth before the man marries another, in case he does marry. Both Renan and Wordsworth married after they were thirty. The incest idea was unconsciously present but repressed by the natural disgust the men felt as a result of education and training. In all likelihood had each of these authors been separated from his sister in infancy and met her years later in youth, he might have fallen in love with her.
The effects of this extreme brotherly and sisterly love have been studied but not yet exhaustively. No doubt much of the effeminacy of Renan, the gentleness, the moral tone, the kindliness, we find in his writings was due to this attachment to his sister. He dedicated his Life of Jesus to her. As I show elsewhere he drew himself in this book, and his love for his sister was a great factor in his making Jesus somewhat effeminate. He has also left a tribute to her in his My Sister Henrietta.
The influence of Wordsworth's sister upon him manifested itself in several ways, one of which is the utter respectability of his poetry, and another the almost total absence of any reference to love or sex. His sister was largely responsible for the trend of her brother's mind. She gave him eyes and ears, as he put it, helped him to observe nature and was herself a great force in the evolution of the new poetry. Her influence has been under- rather than over-estimated. Another reason for the absence of love poetry in Wordsworth may have been due to a guilty conscience, as he left an illegitimate daughter in France, he not being able to marry the mother for justifiable reasons. Professor Harper first published the story.
As one might have expected, neither Henrietta Renan nor Dorothy Wordsworth ever married, though the latter is said to have been in love with Coleridge.
Charles Lamb, the Gentle Elia, owes probably much of his quality of gentleness to his sister Mary, "Bridget Elia." She appears in his famous essays and they collaborated together in writing poems and tales. His kindness was no doubt enhanced by his pity for her unfortunate fits of insanity and by the fact that in one of these fits she had killed her mother.
The love felt for their sisters by Byron and Shelley made the subject of incest a common topic of discussion between them. They went so far as to question whether the law or feeling against marriage between brother and sister was not a convention based on ungrounded prejudice. Byron's love for his sister, Mrs. Augusta Leigh, did not create feminine qualities in him. She was to him a sort of refuge from the disappointment of other love affairs, a shelter when public opinion was against him. His poems to her rank among his best. He may have had unconscious incest thoughts in regard to her, and he may have drawn himself as married to her in Cain, where she may be Cain's sister Adah. But the accusation that Byron ever indulged in unlawful relationship with his sister is a groundless libel. We have no evidence for it and we have no right to make any assumptions because of misinterpretations put on his work. Between the thought and the deed there is a wide gap. Carlyle once said, the hand is on the trigger, but the man is not a murderer before the trigger is pulled. The story of the reputed incest with his sister was first published by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. The myth was revived again by "documentary" evidence furnished by Lord Lovelace, a descendant of Byron, and published in Astarte. A later woman biographer, Ethel C. Mayne, accepts the story. The entire tale is ably demolished by Richard Edggumbe in his Byron, the Last Phase, where he applies, without a knowledge of Freud's views, psychoanalytic methods to Byron. Brandes also defended Byron years ago.
Lord Lovelace published a love letter alleged to have been written to Augusta Leigh, Byron's sister, dated May 17, 1819, but this letter was really meant for Mary Chaworth, to whom he wrote: "I not long ago attached myself to a Venetian for no earthly reason (although a pretty woman) but because she was called ... and she often remarked (without knowing the reason) how fond I was of the name." The name which is crossed out is Mary. The mistress was the Venetian Mariana (the Italian for Mary Anne) Segati, the poet's mistress from November, 1816, to February, 1818. He was thus showing Mary Chaworth he still loved her. It is not likely he would try to impress Augusta with his love for a woman named Mary and again not probable that he would tell his sister of his liaison when he and his sister were supposed to love each other. The tone of this letter differs from that of others to his sister.
In 1820 Byron was writing in his Don Juan that he has a passion for the name Mary, that it still calls up the realm of fancy where he beholds what never was to be, and that he is not yet quite free from the spell. He loved Mary Chaworth all his life.
Byron's alleged criminal attachment to his sister was supposed to be the mystery in Manfred's life, revealed by these words in the second act, when wine is offered to him:
"'tis blood—my blood! the pure warm stream