A BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rogers, John E., Jr. “‘Dearest Friend’: A Study of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals.” Dissertation Abstracts International 35 (1973): 1632–A33A (Ph.D. thesis, Pennsylvania State University).
Contents: I. Companion Never Lost: Introduction; II. The Gentler Spring; III. Thy Wild Eyes: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Vision; IV. The Art of Dorothy Wordsworth; V. Wordsworth and His Exquisite Sister; VI. The Meaning of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals; VIII. Conclusion; Bibliography.
Duffy, Carol Ann. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Christmas Birthday. London: Picador, 2014.
Poem, illustrated by Tom Duxbury. Also published in the Guardian, 20 December 2014.
Fay, Jessica. “Rhythm and Repetition at Dove Cottage.” Philological Quarterly 97.1 (2018) 73–95.
“In the year 1845, under the influence of his Tractarian friend Frederick William Faber, William Wordsworth added a number of new poems to his sonnet series on the history of the Church in England, Ecclesiastical Sonnets. These additional poems celebrating a sequence of Anglican rites – including ‘The Marriage Ceremony,’ ‘Thanksgiving after Childbirth’ (Churching), “Visitation of the Sick,’ and the ‘Funeral Service’ – effectively marked Wordsworth as an Oxford Movement sympathizer” (p. 73).
The article offers an extended treatment of the religious views of William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
Dugas, Kristine Ann. “Literary Journals: Explorations in a Private Literary Form.” Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1984.
“The study focusses on three nineteenth-century journal writers–Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The chapters represent three tendencies in journal composition. . . . The chapters on Dorothy Wordsworth represent those journals which best reveal both the emergence of the metaphoric from the literal and the psychodynamics of a woman writer’s creativity. Wordsworth’s early journals reveal how the course of her imaginative writing was eventually deflected by the informal nature of her work, by its collaborative and exploratory genesis, and by its deliberately contextual design.”
Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
“Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel is an exploration of the relationship between walking and writing. Robin Jarvis here reconstructs the scene of walking, both in Britain and on the Continent, in the 1790s, and analyses the mentality and motives of the early pedestrian traveller. He then discusses the impact of this cultural revolution on the creativity of major Romantic writers, focusing especially on William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, Keats, Hazlitt and Hunt. In readings which engage current debates around literature and travel, landscape aesthetics, ecocriticism, the poetics of gender, and the materiality of Romantic discourse, Jarvis demonstrates how walking became not only a powerful means of self-enfranchisement but also the focus of restless textual energies.”
Copy: Library of Congress.
Kellaway, Deborah, ed. The Virago Book of Women Gardeners. London: Virago Press, 2016.
“From diggers and weeders, to artists and colourists, writers and dreamers to trend-setters, plantswomen to landscape designers, women have contributed to the world of gardening and gardens. Here Deborah Kellaway, author of The Making of an English Country Garden and Favourite Flowers, has collected extracts from the 18th century to the present day, to create a book that is replete with anecdotes and good-humoured advice. Colette, Margery Fish, Germaine Greer, Eleanor Sinclair Rohde, Vita Sackville-West, Rosemary Verey, Edith Wharton and Dorothy Wordsworth are some of the writers represented in this book.”
Copy: Library of Congress.
Ketcham, Carl H. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals, 1824–1835.” Wordsworth Circle 9.1 (Winter, 1978): 3–16.
“. . . Dorothy Wordsworth [in 1824] began keeping a daily record of her life at Rydal Mount and on her extended visits away from home – a record which lasted, with occasional interruptions, until her mental collapse in 1835. These journals, mostly unpublished, have attracted little attention: they cover a period when Wordsworth’s craftsmanship was uneventfully self-assured; they are scrawled and rather difficult to read; and they have been given a bad press by de Selincourt, who disparaged them as terse and uninformative. It is true that they are often, in effect, notes toward a journal – reminders of daily events which were often enough routine, and whose details Dorothy felt no need to set down in full. But they provide a faithful account of Dorothy’s later life in the poet’s household, with glimpses of William, his family and friends; they show that Dorothy, well into her middle years, vas still a tireless, active, sensitive observer, constantly in excited quest of new experiences; and finally, like the Liebestod which rounds Keats’s letters with a tragic period, they close the history of Dorothy’s long years of devotion with a decrescendo of sickness and pain, ending with the sudden darkening of her mind” (p. 3).
Meiners, Katherine T. “Reading Pain and the Feminine Body in Romantic Writing: The Examples of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge.” Centennial Review 37.3 (Fall, 1993): 487–512.
“Romantic encounters with illness and pain precipitate crises of intelligibility, moments when intense pain makes a sufferer unintelligible to others as much as to herself. The nineteenth-century witnesses an increased tendency to professionalize such suffering and turn pain into an event to be objectified and co-opted by other intelligibilities, including those of poetry and medicine. This essay will address Romantic understanding as a complex cultural practice greater than the making of literature which is inclined to seek its remedies for human suffering outside the medical disciplines as much as within them” (p. 487).
Kincaid-Ehlers, Elizabeth. “Blue Woman on a Green Field: A Consideration of Dorothy Wordsworth.” Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1976): 2291A–92A.
University of Rochester thesis.
Grinnell, George C. The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Advertisement: “Examining the ways in which hypochondria forms both a malady and a metaphor for a range of British Romantic writers, Grinnell contends that this is not one illness amongst many, but a disorder of the very ability to distinguish between illness and health, a malady of interpretation that mediates a broad spectrum of pressing cultural questions.”
See index.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Dorothy Wordsworth 