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Ashton — I Had a Sister (1937)

Ashton, Helen, and Katharine Davies. I Had a Sister: A Study of Mary Lamb, Dorothy Wordsworth, Caroline Herschel, Cassandra Austen. London: Lovat Dickson Limited, 1937.

See pp. 83–142. With illustrations by William Townsend. The sections on Mary Lamb and Dorothy Wordsworth are by Helen Ashton; the sections on Caroline Herschel and Cassandra Austen are by Katharine Davies.

Copies: Library of Congress [microfilm only] — Wordsworth Trust (Reference 1994.42.142)

Reprint: Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1975. Library of Congress (PR119 .A8 1975).
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Aalto — Writing Wild (2020)

Aalto, Kathryn. Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World. Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 2020.

Abstract: “In Writing Wild, Kathryn Aalto celebrates 25 women whose influential writing helps deepen our connection to and understanding of the natural world. These inspiring wordsmiths are scholars, spiritual seekers, conservationists, scientists, novelists, and explorers. They defy easy categorization, yet they all share a bold authenticity that makes their work both distinct and universal. Featured writers include: Dorothy Wordsworth, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Gene Stratton-Porter, Mary Austin, and Vita Sackville-West, Nan Shepherd, Rachel Carson, Mary Oliver, Carolyn Merchant, and Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Diane Ackerman, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Lauret Savoy, Rebecca Solnit, Kathleen Jamie, Carolyn Finney, Helen Macdonald, and Saci Lloyd, Andrea Wulf, Camille T. Dungy, Elena Passarello, Amy Liptrot, and Elizabeth Rush. Part travel essay, literary biography, and cultural history, Writing Wild ventures into the landscapes and lives of extraordinary writers and encourages a new generation of women to pick up their pens, head outdoors, and start writing wild.”

Contents: Introduction — Dorothy Wordsworth — Susan Fenimore Cooper — Gene Stratton-Porter —Mary Austin — Vita Sackville-West — Nan Shepherd — Rachel Carson — Mary Oliver — Carolyn Merchant — Annie Dillard — Gretel Ehrlich — Leslie Marmon Silko — Diane Ackerman — Robin Wall Kimmerer — Lauret Savoy — Rebecca Solnit — Kathleen Jamie — Carolyn Finney — Helen MacDonald — Saci Lloyd — Andrea Wulf — Camile T. Dungy — Elena Passarello — Amy Liptrot — Elizabeth Rush — Afterword.

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Andrews — Wanderers (2021)

Andrews, Kerri. Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. London: Reaktion Books, 2021.

Abstract (back cover): “This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. In a series of intimate, incisive portraits, Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson’s daughter Elizabeth Carter – who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England – to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. Offering a beguiling, alternative view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing – of being – articulated by these ten pathfinding women.”

Contents: Foreword — Setting off — Elizabeth Carter — Dorothy Wordsworth — Ellen Weeton — Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt— Harriet Martineau — Virginia Woolf — Nan Shepherd — Anaïs Nin — Cheryl Strayed — Linda Cracknell and a female tradition — Coda — Appendix.

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Lafford — Dorothy Wordsworth and the Writing of Resolve (2022)

Lafford, Erin. “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Writing of Resolve.” Cambridge Quarterly 5.13 (September 2022): 207–24.

Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal is a text framed self-consciously as the result of her ‘resolve’ to write it. When studied carefully, this term captures at once a capacity for firm intention and steadfastness of purpose, and the potential for lapse and dissolution; Wordsworth’s journal holds both senses in play as it forms an index of habitual life. Reading the journal alongside two rich sites of reflection on the psychophysiological contours of habit—household management and domestic health regimen—invites attention towards it as a more capacious form for tracing the fluctuating nature of self-control than perhaps her brother’s Romantic lyric.”

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Gittings — Dorothy Wordsworth (1985)

Gittings, Robert, and Jo Manton. Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

“The last scholarly biography of Dorothy Wordsworth, written by Ernest de Selincourt, appeared over fifty years ago. Despite the great merits of this work, a new Life must be needed to take into account much that has emerged in the past five decades, and, in particular, more recent editing and scholarship” (p. vii).

Contents: List of plates — 1. “Dear Aunt” — 2. “Poor Dolly” — 3. “The Oeconomy of Charity” — 4. “The character and virtues of my Brother” — 5. “The First Home” — 6. “Coleridge’s Society” — 7. “Lyrical Ballads”— 8. “Wild, sequestered valley” — 9. “Plenty of Business” — 10. “Either joy or sorrow” — 11. “My tears will flow” — 12. “I shall always date Grasmere” — 13. “Those innocent children” — 14. “The Ambleside Gentry” — 15. “Dear Antelope” — 16. “We all want Miss W.” — 17. “This quiet room” — 18. “Oftener merry than sad” — Appendix One — Appendix Two — Notes — Bibliography — Index.

Reviews: Joyce Johnson, Washington Post, Book World, 1 September 1985, p. 5; Leon Waldoff, Modern Language Review 83.1 (1988): 157.

Copy: Library of Congress.

Digital copy: Internet Archive.

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Davis — Structure of the Picturesque (1978)

Davis, Robert Con. “The Structure of the Picturesque: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals.” Wordsworth Circle 9.1 (Winter, 1978): 45–49.

“Relying heavily on the picturesque in the Alfoxden-Grasmere journals, Dorothy Wordsworth raised two important questions about its meaning. What does the picturesque say about man and nature, about the phenomenal world? And, why does it collide with Romantic sensibility?” (p. 45)

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Corkran — Romance of Woman’s Influence (1906)

Corkran, Alice. The Romance of Woman’s Influence: St. Monica, Vittoria Colonna, Madame Guyon, Caroline Herschel, Mary Unwin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Other Mothers, Wives, Sisters, and Friends who Have Helped Great Men. London: Blackie and Sons, 1906.

See pp. 185–214. “To speak of Dorothy Wordsworth is to speak of a poet in prose as remarkable as William Wordsworth was a poet in verse. But it is not of Dorothy, the writer of the journal, from which many a painter might paint scenes of surpassing beauty, from which many a poet might have derived inspiration,—it is not so much of this Dorothy that I shall speak, as of Dorothy, the sister, the inspirer of her brother, his friend and companion” ( p. 185).

Digital copy: Google Books.