A BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stone, Marjorie, and Judith Thompson, eds. Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
See Anne D. Wallace, “Home at Grasmere Again: Revising the Family in Dove Cottage,” pp. 100–23.
Stewart, Suzanne. “‘The Eye It Cannot Choose but See’: Dorothy Wordsworth, John Constable, and the Plein-Air Sketch.” English Studies 92.4 (2011): 405–31.
Abstract: “The paper aims to advance the scholarship on Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) with a study that situates her writing in its art historical context. While critics often acknowledge her extraordinary visual perceptiveness, none has examined her descriptive landscape prose in relation to turn-of-the-century developments in landscape painting. Dorothy’s The Alfoxden Journal (1798) and The Grasmere Journals (1800–3) coincide with the intensification of sketching the landscape en plein air (c. 1800) among painters in Britain and Europe. Specifically, I discuss these two journals in relation to sketches by John Constable, the most committed and sustained practitioner of plein-air painting in early nineteenth-century England. Natural effects that Dorothy describes in the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals closely resemble features that Constable was simultaneously depicting in the open air: natural light observed at specific times of day; a broad and vivid range of colours; and fluctuating atmospheric and weather conditions. Similarities between Dorothy’s prose and Constable’s sketches not only reflect their shared engagement in the aesthetic turn towards naturalism during this period, when direct observation of nature’s widely varied and transient features was replacing classically derived principles of ideal form and compositional order characteristic of landscape art in the eighteenth century, but also reveal the deliberateness with which Dorothy sought to replicate in her writing the intensity of observation and particularity of description that she admired in visual art.”
Thomas, Edward. Feminine Influence on the Poets. London: Martin Secker, 1910; New York: John Lane Co., 1911.
See pp. 26, et seq., 32, 33, 188–95, 198.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Digital copy: HathiTrust.
Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
For references to Dorothy Wordsworth, see index.
Kovacik, Karen. “Dorothy Wordsworth.” College English 47.4 (April 1985): 374–75.
Poem about Dorothy on her brother’s wedding day.
Coe, Charles Norton. Wordsworth and the Literature of Travel. New York: Bookman Associates, 1953.
Scattered references to Dorothy Wordsworth; see pp. 19, 29–32, 47–48, 82–83.
Digital copy: Internet Archive.
Weiger, Sarah. “‘A Love for Things That Have No Feeling’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Significant Others.” European Romantic Review 23.6 (2012): 651–69.
Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s infrequently-cited poem, ‘Loving & Liking,’ offers a theory of love as an ethical relation to human and nonhuman others. This essay reads the poem with passages from the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals, exploring the various ways in which Wordsworth is responsive to objects and things that seem to distinguish themselves to her, standing out from their surroundings to catch her attention as individuals worthy of careful and extended engagement. Through the terms of this engagement, a tree is not simply an elm tree but what she calls ‘a creature by its own self’; a waterfall not only stands ‘upright by itself,’ but also is ‘its own self.’ Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, this essay identifies these objects and things in Wordsworth’s work as ‘significant others.’ Bringing the aesthetic and natural historical discourses of the Romantic period into conversation with current post-humanist and ecocritical ones, this essay explores the role of a special form of description in Dorothy’s relationships to nonhuman others.”
Copy: Web.
Leask, Nigel. Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Abstract: “Stepping Westward is the first book dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720–1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century’s worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities. It pays attention to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book’s core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to ‘improve’ the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin’s picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of ‘home tours’ from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the ‘romantic Highlands’ were reinvented in Scott’s poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance, and emigration.”
See Chap 5: “‘Inhabited Solitudes’: Dorothy Wordsworth and the Legacy of the Picturesque Tour.”
Copy: Library of Congress.
Carr, Ruth. Feather and Bone: Poems in Response to Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855), Mary Ann McCracken (1770–1866). Dublin: Arlen House, 2018.
Abstract: “Carr’s poems explore the lives of two women who lived contemporaneously but never met—Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Ann McCracken. The poems reflect how they lived their lives alongside their more famous brothers, with Mary Ann’s political strength carrying her through tragedy and Dorothy’s calmer ‘foxglove feeling’ for life.”
For an interview with Carr about her book, see The Honest Ulsterman, September 2024.
Copy: Library of Congress.
A scholarly website (published in December 2023) edited by Michael Levy, Nicholas Mason, and Paul Westover.
Dorothy Wordsworth 