Easley — Wandering Women (1996)

Abstract: “This essay provides a historical context for Dorothy Wordsworth’s depictions of vagrant women in the Grasmere Journals. The first part of the essay examines the ways in which the discourses on vagrancy intersected with the discourses on gender during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second part of the essay examines how images of women in social and economic discourses are reflected in Dorothy Wordsworth’s depictions of female vagrants in the Grasmere Journals. Though on the surface, Wordsworth seems to be non‐judgemental and sympathetic in her depictions of the poor, a closer reading reveals that these representations are not as ideologically “innocent” as they first appear. Though Dorothy Wordsworth was in many ways isolated from society, her representations of the poor still existed in a complex intertextual relationship with the social and political discourses of her day.”