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Fennimore — Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect (2024)

Fennimore, Eve Dixon. “‘Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Revisiting’ on the 1820 Continental Tour.” Criterion 17.1 (Winter, 2024): 89–103.

Abstract: “This paper argues that Dorothy Wordsworth, in her often overlooked Journal of a Tour on the Continent, was essentially ‘revisiting’ places that she was viewing for the first time, as she had visited them secondhand through William’s stories and writings about them. In 1820, Dorothy, William, and Mary Wordsworth embarked on a tour of the continent in the inverse direction of William’s youthful 1790 trip. For thirty years, Dorothy had heard stories and read about his experiences, building up an image in her mind of what the Continent would be like which changed her own exploration of the sights. By exploring Dorothy’s tour as a form of revisiting, we see how imagining a place before physically seeing it shapes the viewing experience, blurring the line between reality and imagination. Further, a close study of Dorothy’s journal illustrates the impermanence of sites and travelers as they inevitably change over time.”

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Feder — Experimental Dorothy Wordsworth (2014)

Feder, Rachel. “The Experimental Dorothy Wordsworth.” Studies in Romanticism 53.4 (Winter, 2014): 541–59.

“To read Dorothy Wordsworth as an experimental writer, we must investigate how nineteenth-century books of daily writing functions as sites of intertextual and generic experimentation. As text objects that imitate public forms while serving private functions, such books facilitate cross-genre and cross textual conversation, collaboration, and invention” (p. 541).

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Comitini — More Than Half a Poet (2003)

Comitini, Patricia. ‘“More Than Half A Poet”: Vocational Philanthropy in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals.’” European Romantic Review 14.3 (2003): 307–22.

“The way criticism has treated Dorothy Wordsworth has all to do with the way she represents herself, her writing, and her brother in her journals. Scholars have labored to understand the function of the Grasmere Journal and of “Dorothy Wordsworth” as a representation of nineteenth-century womanhood. Whether characterizing her as a domestic subject, novice writer or helpmate, scholarship has focused primarily on her failure to realize herself, develop her talent, or establish her own home” (p. 307).
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Walker — Dorothy Wordsworth (1988)

Walker, Eric. C. “Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, and the Kirkstone Pass.” Wordsworth Circle 19.3 (June 1988): 116–21.

“I offer these various Kirkstone texts as an example of a generally overlooked connection between the two writers, and I want to suggest that it is still useful to study William’s texts that are subsequent to and dependent upon Dorothy’s texts, not to assemble wrongheaded evidence of the better writer Dorothy Wordsworth could not be, but simply to begin to assemble in a systematic way the evidence of how Dorothy Wordsworth’s prose has been read” (p. 116).

Copy: Library of Congress.