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Duffin — Dorothy Wordsworth (1955)

Duffin, H. C. “Dorothy Wordsworth.” Contemporary Review 187 (January 1955): 47–51.

“Even apart from its pitiful ending, Dorothy Wordsworth’s life was a tragedy. No one can blame Wordsworth for marrying, but his marriage to Mary Hutchinson was a betrayal of Dorothy, and the ruin it made of her life was reflected in his poetry. The sight of the gradual death, in Dorothy, of the brilliant happiness that had been hers, and his, before 1802, poisoned his own happiness, and hence the springs of poetry in him” (p. 50).

Web: Internet Archive.

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Easley — To Dorothy Wordsworth (2002)

Easley, Alexis. “To Dorothy Wordsworth.” Canadian Woman Studies 22.2 (Fall, 2002–Winter 2003): 147.

“It wasn’t until last summer, when I finally walked your path, trudging through cow gate and muddy field, that I was able to know what led you to walk and to write: it was a way of defeating stillness.”

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Veevers — Jane and Dorothy (2018)

Veevers, Marian. Jane and Dorothy: A True Tale of Sense and Sensibility: The Lives of Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth. New York: Pegasus Books, 2018.

Contents: Prologue: The inward secrets of our hearts — Part 1: Gentlemen’s daughters, Little prattlers among men, Original sin, Fashionably educated and left without a fortune — Part 2: Love and friendship, Ladies of the rectory, A happy command of language, Considering the future, Falling in love, Betrayal, Journeys, brothers, freedom and confinement, A house of my own — Part 3: An experiment in liberty, My own darling child, A small revolution, Poetry and prose, A maid whom there were none to praise, Homecoming and exile, Exercised to constraint — Our affections do rebel, Very capable of loving, Marriage: The settlement we should aim at — Part 4: Writing and publication: My father cannot provide for us, Another exile, another homecoming — Part 5: Beyond 1809 — Epilogue: A natural sequel to an unnatural beginning? — Appendix 1: Stanzas from The Minstrel — Appendix 2: The Forest-Epode — Appendix 3: Among All the Lovely Things My Love Had Been.

Review: Frances Wilson, “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 2017.

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Mallaby — Dorothy Wordsworth (1950)

Mallaby, George. “Dorothy Wordsworth: The Perfect Sister.” The Atlantic 186.6 (December 1950): 81–83.

“We, who are alive, hardly know when we are happy. We are always looking ahead, thinking, or at least hoping, that ‘the best is yet to be.’ When we ponder and judge the lives of dead men, we say to ourselves, taking credit for the acuteness of our intellectual perception, ‘That was the climax of their happiness; in those years they lived to the full.’ There are no three persons, at least in the history of literature, about whom it is easier thus to express ourselves, than about Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister Dorothy. Even in their own lifetimes they knew that from 1797 to 1802 they shared a lustrum of sympathy and love and achievement which were proof against worldly accidents and tribulations. In that golden period these three persons were an undivided and indivisible trinity. When the triune spell was broken each of them failed – Coleridge fell into a self-deceiving idleness, morbid imaginings of jealousy and mistrust, an opiate confusion of mind and heart; Wordsworth, arming himself with the shield of a rather self-righteous duty, moved boldly but remorsefully away from ‘the vision splendid’; Dorothy, overburdened with household cares and perplexed with spiritual disappointments and dismay, surrendered to a senseless melancholy” (p. 81).

Text: Web.

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McGinnis — Material Agency and the “Cluttered” Environment

McGinnis, April. “Material Agency and the ‘Cluttered’ Environment in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Travel Narratives.” European Romantic Review 33.3 (2022): 411–25.

Abstract: “Recent critical studies have explored the cultural significance of walking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the connection between bodily activity and creative energies: in its rhythmic, repetitive motion, walking can bring the subject into a semi-hypnotic state that invites mental wandering. This essay traces the experience of walking through Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel narratives, but I shift focus from moving unhindered through open spaces to physically navigating more challenging environments. Drawing on James J. Gibson’s theory of environmental affordances and Andrew Pickering’s concept of nonhuman agency, I consider how cluttered landscapes persistently conduct our attention to the material continuity between human traveler and nonhuman environment. My suggestion is that this heightened awareness inspires a mode of ecological thinking that alters the individual’s ethical sensibility toward the nonhuman world. This conclusion demonstrates the often overlooked value of those less accommodating natural spaces. Moreover, reading Wordsworth’s narratives with an eye toward her presentation of material agency may help us to recover a sense of Wordsworth’s own authorial agency.”

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De Quincey — De Quincey to Wordsworth (1963)

Jordan, John E. De Quincey to Wordsworth: A Biography of a Relationship. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; London: Cambridge University Press, 1962.

Includes letters from De Quincey to the Wordsworth family. Very extensive references to Dorothy Wordsworth; see index.

Review: W. J. B. Owen, Modern Language Review 58.2 (April 1963): 247–48.

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Cook — ‘I Will Not Quarrel with Myself’ (1991)

Cook, Kay Kellam. “‘I Will Not Quarrel with Myself’: Dorothy Wordsworth, Subjectivity, and Romantic Autobiography.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Colorado—Boulder, 1991.

Abstract: “This dissertation proposes a theory of women’s private writings through an examination of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal (1800–1803) and Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803). Additionally, I address the place of private writings in current critical discussions of literature and identity in early nineteenth-century England. Locating Dorothy Wordsworth in the Romantic movement and within the tradition of autobiography of necessity complicates theories and assessments of both. Following an introduction to my own theory of the journal as genre and a contextualization of that theory in other critical approaches, I look at Dorothy Wordsworth’s choice of the journal form to record her experiences as a strategical act that deflects the male (William’s) gaze. I then examine the subjectifying strategies within that form—amatory discourse, the locative impulse, perceptual experimentation—that work toward creating a self that often resists the unified impulse of much hegemonic self-writing, best exemplified by her brother’s autobiographical work, The Prelude. Within the critical framework that I identify—parataxis, immersion, fragmentation, and detail—I examine specific passages in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals that exemplify how the genre permits experimentation and expression counter to the dominant approaches of autobiography. ¶ An analysis of Wordsworth’s Tour, which follows, is placed in the context of travel literature in the early nineteenth century. My purpose is to examine generic differences between the private journal and the more public tour, to make distinctions between the categories of the sublime and the picturesque in the Tour, and to introduce a third category of perception, ‘singular absorption,’ which is particularly amenable to the immersive strategies in Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings. ¶ The conclusion emphasizes that ignoring private life writings in theories of autobiography or of notions of identity in the early nineteenth century results in incomplete assessments of either.”

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Kappes — Fashioning a Voice of Her Own (2009)

Kappes, Gabrielle A. F. “Fashioning a Voice of Her Own: The Poetics of Place in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Poetry, Narratives, and Travel Writing.” Honors thesis, Wheaton College, 6 May 2009.

Contents: Introduction — Chapter 1. Rooting Poetic Voice in Landscape: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Poetry — Chapter 2. The “Inner Histories” of Grasmere: Community as Archive in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Narrative of George and Sarah Green — Chapter 3. Mapping Foreign Lands: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Travel Writing as the Creative Process — Coda.

Copy: Web.

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Reed — Happy Women (1913)

Reed, Myrtle. Happy Women. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913.

Treats Dolly Madison, Dorothy Wordsworth, Queen Louise, Caroline Herschel, Elizabeth Browning, Charlotte Cushman, Lucretia Mott, Florence Nightingale, Sister Dora, Jenny Lind, Louisa Alcott, Queen Victoria. (For the chapter devoted to Dorothy Wordsworth, see pp. 35–46.)

Copy: Library of Congress.

Digital copy:  HathiTrust.

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Richardson — Dangers of Sympathy (1985)

Richardson, Alan. “The Dangers of Sympathy: Sibling Incest in English Romantic Poetry.” Studies in English Literature 25.4 (Autumn, 1985): 737–54.

Abstract: “. . . Richardson investigates the recurring motif of intimate brother-sister relationships in the work of English Romantic poets, including Byron, William Wordsworth, and Robert Southey.”