Brownstein, Rachel Mayer. “The Private Life: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals.” Modern Language Quarterly 34.1 (1973): 48–63.
“The Alfoxden-Grasmere journal contains a skeletal story of Dorothy’s and William’s perfect intimacy, his unexplained marriage and her wrenching loss, and finally the queer peace the three Wordsworths made together. . . . Nature stirs her to wonder and to words in an attempt to apprehend it before it dissolves into time; she watches it carefully for signs of the seam between reality and illusion, weighing fact and metaphor. Unambitious. she rarely organizes quantities of data, and for the most part fragment follows fragment. The journal form, unpretentious and dogged, loose but self-limiting, unfinished, with the smell of the private writing room forever about it, is admirably suited to what Dorothy Wordsworth had to say” (pp. 60–61, 63).
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Dorothy Wordsworth 