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Winter — Undersong (2021)

Winter, Kathleen. Undersong: A Novel. Canada: Knopf, 2021.

Abstract: “When young James Dixon, a local jack-of-all-trades recently returned from the Battle of Waterloo, meets Dorothy Wordsworth, he quickly realizes he’s never met another woman anything like her. In her early thirties, Dorothy has already lived a wildly unconventional life. And as her famous brother William Wordsworth’s confidante and creative collaborator—considered by some in their circle to be the secret to his success as a poet—she has carved a seemingly idyllic existence for herself, alongside William and his wife, in England’s Lake District. ¶ One day, Dixon is approached by William to do some handiwork around the Wordsworth estate. Soon he takes on more and more chores—and quickly understands that his real, unspoken responsibility is to keep an eye on Dorothy, who is growing frail and melancholic. The unlikely pair of misfits form a sympathetic bond despite the troubling chasm in social class between them, and soon Dixon is the quiet witness to everyday life in Dorothy’s family and glittering social circle, which includes literary legends Samuel Coleridge, Thomas de Quincy, William Blake, and Charles and Mary Lamb. ¶ Through the fictional James Dixon—a gentle but troubled soul, more attuned to the wonders of the garden he faithfully tends than to vexing worldly matters—we step inside the Wordsworth family, witnessing their dramatic emotional and artistic struggles, hidden traumas, private betrayals and triumphs. At the same time, Winter slowly weaves a darker, complex ‘undersong’ through the novel, one as earthy and elemental as flower and tree, gradually revealing the pattern of Dorothy’s rich, hidden life—that of a woman determined, against all odds, to exist on her own terms. But the unsettling effects of Dorothy’s tragically repressed brilliance take their toll, and when at last her true voice sings out, it is so searing and bright that Dixon must make an impossible choice.”

For an account by Winter of her experiences in writing the novel, see this essay by her (Web), and an interview by Trevor Corkum (Web). For a description of a talk by  Winter, see Hannah Britton, “An Afternoon with Dorothy Wordsworth,” 6 August 2019 (Web).

Reviews: Janet Somerville, “Dorothy Wordsworth Finally Gets Her Poetic Due in Kathleen Winter’s New Novel ‘Undersong,’” Toronto Star, 13 August 2021 [Web]. Doreen Yakabuski, 29 August 2021 [Web]. — Brett Josef Grubisic, “Poetry She Wrote,” Literary Review of Canada, September 2021 [Web], ⁠ Marie Wadden, “Winter Captures Kindred Spirit,” Newfoundland Quarterly, January 2022 [Web].
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Comitini — Vocational Philanthropy (2005)

Comitini, Patricia. Vocational Philanthropy and British Women’s Writing, 1790–1810: Wollstonecraft, More, Edgeworth, Wordsworth. Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005.

Abstract (jacket): “Patricia Comitini’s study compels serious rethinking of how literature by women in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries should be read. Beginning with a description of the ways in which evolving conceptions of philanthropy were foundational to constructions of class and gender roles, Comitini argues that these changes enabled a particular kind of feminine benevolence that was linked to women’s work as writers.”

Copy: Library of Congress.
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Hutchinson — Letters of Sara Hutchinson (1954)

Hutchinson, Sara. Letters of Sarah Hutchinson from 1800 to 1835. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954.

The previously unpublished correspondence of the sister of William Wordsworth’s wife. Very extensive references to Dorothy Wordsworth; see index.
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Hegeman — Three English Bluestockings (1957)

Hegeman, Daniel V. “Three English Bluestockings Visit Germany.” Kentucky Foreign Language Quarterly 4.2 (1957): 57–73.

“Not least among the eighteenth century’s claims to distinction is the fact that it produced for the first time in human history the intellectual emancipation of woman on a large scale” (p. 57). The three women in the title are Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Elizabeth Robinson Montague, and Dorothy Wordsworth.

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Healey — Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge (2012)

Healey, Nicola. Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Contents: Introduction: Dorothy Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge and the Poetics of Relationship — ‘Fragments from the universal’: Hartley Coleridge’s Poetics of Relationship — The Coleridge Family: Influence, Identity and Representation — ‘Who is the Poet?’: Hartley Coleridge, William Wordsworth and the ‘The Use of a Poet’ — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals: Writing the Self, Writing Relationship — Sibling Conversations: The Wordsworthian Construction of Authorship — ‘My hidden life’: Dorothy, William and Poetic Identity — ‘The common life which is the real life’: Family Authorship and Identity.

Copy: Library of Congress.
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Easley — Wandering Women (1996)

Easley, Alexis. “Wandering Women: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals and the Discourse on Female Vagrancy.” Women’s Writing 3.1 (1996), 63–77.

Abstract: “This essay provides a historical context for Dorothy Wordsworth’s depictions of vagrant women in the Grasmere Journals. The first part of the essay examines the ways in which the discourses on vagrancy intersected with the discourses on gender during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second part of the essay examines how images of women in social and economic discourses are reflected in Dorothy Wordsworth’s depictions of female vagrants in the Grasmere Journals. Though on the surface, Wordsworth seems to be non‐judgemental and sympathetic in her depictions of the poor, a closer reading reveals that these representations are not as ideologically “innocent” as they first appear. Though Dorothy Wordsworth was in many ways isolated from society, her representations of the poor still existed in a complex intertextual relationship with the social and political discourses of her day.”
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Esterhammer — Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland (2015)

Estherhammer, Angela, Dianne Piccitto, and Patrick Vincent, eds. Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects. (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print.) Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

“Among the authors discussed are Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Byron, Mary Shelley, James Boswell, Frances Brooke, Walter Scott, Felicia Hemans, and the Swiss cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer.” See Chap. 8, “Prints, Panoramas, and Picturesque Travel in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of a Tour on the Continent” by Pamela Buck.