WILLIAM AND DOROTHY

Hard luck that this should come so close to Frances Winwar's admirable biographical study of the same trio, the Wordsworths and Coleridge, for Miss Ashton's novel follows closely the same pattern as Farewell the Banner, although she confines her story to the Dorothy -- Coleridge facets, where Miss Winwar covers a farther reach but uses her searchlight for the relations between William Wordsworth and Coleridge. Miss Ashton has cast her material in novel form, a medium to which it is admirably suited, but of which she has taken so little advantage that one wonders why she chose it. One feels that even the bits of occasional dialogue are drawn from fact, and, except in elaborating, perhaps, the account of the trip Wordsworth and his sister made to France before his marriage, and expanding on the jealously which surrounded Coleridge -- his wife, Dorothy, Sara, each of the other -- the book would pass as biography. The period covered is the period of the relations with Coleridge. Thoroughly readable, and for those who prefer the fictionized form, a good choice.