Category: Uncategorized

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Bohls — Women Travel Writers (1995)

Bohls, Elizabeth A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

See Chap. 6, “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Cultural Politics of Scenic Tourism,” pp. 170–208.

Summary: “Dorothy Wordsworth is best known not for her travel journals, but for those she kept at home: at the cottage she shared with her brother William in Grasmere, in the heart of the scenic Lake District. The prevalent image of Wordsworth as something of a homebody, content to cook, clean, and copy poems for her more publicly ambitious brother, contrasts with Mary Wollstonecraft’s self-assertive, consciously politicized persona. Feminist critics have been intrigued by the contrast between the habitual, sometimes distressing self-effacement of the sister’s writing and the brother’s expansive Romantic ego. But Wordsworth’s treatment of aesthetic discourse in the journals and in her remarkable travel narrative, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, shares significant features with Wollstonecraft’s anti-aesthetics. Both writers disrupt and reconceptualize the aesthetic perception of land. Both are concerned with the practical realities of dwelling in a place and the ways in which these can or should influence perceptual pleasure, for those who dwell there and those who travel through. ¶ The Grasmere Journals take advantage of a particular conjuncture of material and cultural conditions to achieve, with understated grace, a textual integration of aesthetic and practical. Walking in the hills and enjoying their visual qualities takes its place for Wordsworth among the practices of housework, gardening, socializing, almsgiving, reading, and writing.”

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Death of Wordsworth’s Sister (16 February 1855)

“Death of Wordsworth’s Sister.” Elgin Courant and Morayshire Courier, 16 February 1855, p. 4.

Obituary. “The living links that unite us to poets of the first half of the present century are fast disappearing from among us. Last week added another of the many that have gone. Dorothy Wordsworth, the only sister of William Wordsworth, died at Rydal Mount in Westmoreland, on the 25th of January, in her eighty-fourth year.”

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Soderholm — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Return (1995)

Soderholm, James. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Return to Tintern Abbey.” New Literary History 26.2 (Spring, 1995): 309–22.

“After analyzing the last section of ‘Tintern Abbey,’ I will discuss [Dorothy Wordsworth’s poem] ‘Thoughts on my sick bed.’ I will argue that it replies directly to the hopes of futurity evoked in the last lines of her brother’s poem. Dorothy’s poem echoes her brother’s earlier works, borrowing from them as liberally as William once borrowed from her journals. The intermingling of poetic images helps us to reexamine the function of address and apostrophe: figural evocations of subjectivity produced by turning, and returning, to another person. I will conclude with a few remarks about the meaning of recent critical views of both Wordsworths” (p. 309).

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Cervelli — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology (2007)

Cervelli, Kenneth R. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Contents:  Introduction — 1. Bringing It All Back Home: The Ecology of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals — 2. The High Road Home: Paths to Ecology in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland — 3. The Illuminated Earth: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecopoetry — 4. “More Allied to Human Life”: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Communion with the Dead — Conclusion: Trapped in the Weather of the Days: Dorothy Wordsworth in Her Environment — Notes — Bibliography — Index.

Summary (from the Routledge website): “Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere), these journals have proven especially useful for readers wanting a more intimate glimpse of arguably the most important poet of the Romantic period. ¶ With the rise of women’s studies in the 1980s, however, came a shift in critical perspective. Scholars such as Margaret Homans and Susan Levin revaluated Dorothy’s work on its own terms, as well as in relation to other female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of a larger shift in the academy, feminist-oriented analyses of Dorothy’s writings take their place alongside other critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and into the next decade. ¶ One such approach, ecocriticism, closely parallels Dorothy’s changing critical fortunes in the mid-to-late 1980s. Curiously, however, the major ecocritical investigations of the Romantic period all but ignore Dorothy’s work while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between ecocriticism and feminism. The present study situates Dorothy in an ongoing ecocritical dialogue through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.”

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Benstock — Private Self (1988)

Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

See J. H. McGavran, Jr., “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals – Putting Herself Down,” pp. 230–53.

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Brownstein — Private Life (1973)

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).

Copy on Web: PDF.

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Newlyn — William and Dorothy Wordsworth (2013)

Newlyn, Lucy. William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Contents: Homeless — Windy Brow and Racedown — Alfoxden — Hamburg — Goslar and Sockburn — Homecoming — Dwelling — The Grasmere Journal — The Orchard at Town End — Scotland — Grasmere and Coleorton — The Lake District — The Continent — Wanderlust — Rydal — Home — List of abbreviations — Notes. Bibliography — Index.

“Separated from William and Dorothy Wordsworth in December 1798—the year of the Lyrical Ballads—Coleridge wrote to his friends, ‘You have all in each other, but I am lonely, and want you.’ It was a revealing acknowledgement of the deep, almost exclusive intimacy that had by then developed between the siblings. Theirs was ‘a strange love, profound, almost dumb,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw.’ A suspicion of something illicit in the Wordsworths’ relationship began to circulate in their lifetime, and has had a habit of resurfacing. In this book, however, I am interested in the siblings’ cohabitation as evidence of their intense emotional and spiritual need, which arose out of circumstances unique to their family history” (p. xi).

Review: Cecily Erin Hill, Women’s Writing 21, no. 2 (2014): 278–80.

Second edition (paperback), 2016.

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Gibson —  Illness of Dorothy Wordsworth (1982)

Gibson, Iris I. J. M. “Illness of Dorothy Wordsworth.” British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Edition) 285 (18–25 December 1982): 1813–15.

“I regard her [migraine] attacks as multifactorial in origin, due to considerable physical and mental activity, to the stress of William’s problems and struggles with composition, and her undue anxiety about him” (p. 1813).