Tag: Alfoxden journal

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Alexander — Dorothy Wordsworth

Alexander, Meena. “Dorothy Wordsworth: The Grounds of Writing.” Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal 14.3 (1988): 195–210.

“After the vivid, almost miraculous years of the Alfoxden Journal (1798) and the Grasmere Journals (1800–1803) Dorothy Wordsworth settled into tasks of helping keep house for her brother and sister-in law’s growing family. Domestic duties sometimes accumulated. . . The daily round in the home she shares with her brother and his family deprives her of a chance to sit quietly, collect her thoughts and feel that at least a short while she possesses herself” (p. 195).

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Stewart — ‘The Eye It Cannot Choose but See’ (2011)

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.”

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Weiger — Love for Things (2012)

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.”

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Fletcher — Wordsworth in Context (1992)

Fletcher, Pauline, and John Murphy, eds. Wordsworth in Context. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1992.

See Pamela Woof, “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals and the Engendering of Poetry,” pp. 122–55; Jared Curtis, “‘Poem Hid in a Tin Box’: Dorothy Wordsworth and the Inscription for a seat by the pathway side ascending Windy Brow,” pp. 156–72.
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Butler — William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1997)

Butler, James A. “William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘Emma,’ and a German Translation in the Alfoxden Notebook.” Studies in Romanticism 36.2 (Summer, 1997): 157–71.

“The Alfoxden Notebook, now at the Wordsworth Library in Grasmere, is one of the central documents of the English Romantic Movement, for in that Notebook, William Wordsworth, early in 1798, developed his conceptions of the union and harmony of all things, of the mind’s creative interplay with the natural world. Of the many passages scholars have pored over in the Alfoxden Notebook, one text, though it has received scant attention, sheds light on William and his sister Dorothy in their crisis year of 1802. Within the Notebook appears (in a German script which makes it difficult to identify the writer by penmanship) a translation of William’s ‘The Two April Mornings,’ headed ‘Die zwey Aprilmorgens.’ But careful examination of this hitherto-unpublished translation shows Dorothy Wordsworth to have written the work early in 1802, shortly after William and Mary Hutchinson decided to wed. Dorothy’s selection of this poem to translate not only illuminates her emotional state in 1802 but also the complex interrelationships of works mentioning ‘Emma’ (William’s name for Dorothy in his poetry) written in 1798, 1800, and 1802” (p. 157).
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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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Brownstein — Private Life (1973)

Brownstein, Rachel Mayer. “The Private Life: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals.” Modern Language Quarterly 34.1 (1973): 48–63.

“The Alfoxden-Grasmere journal contains a skeletal story of Dorothy’s and William’s perfect intimacy, his unexplained marriage and her wrenching loss, and finally the queer peace the  three Wordsworths made together. . . .  Nature stirs her to wonder and to words in an attempt to  apprehend it before it dissolves into time; she watches it carefully for  signs of the seam between reality and illusion, weighing fact and metaphor. Unambitious. she rarely organizes quantities of data, and for the most part fragment follows fragment. The journal form, unpretentious and dogged, loose but self-limiting, unfinished, with the smell of the private writing room forever about it, is admirably suited to what Dorothy Wordsworth had to say”  (pp. 60–61, 63).

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Newlyn — Confluence (2011)

Newlyn, Lucy. “Confluence: William and Dorothy Wordsworth in 1798.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.2 (2011): 227–45.

Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal exemplifies the collaborative nature of creativity in the Wordsworth household. As a kind of commonplace book, it served to record shared experiences (often connected with conversations) which could be used as a future creative resource. But it was also an expression of Dorothy’s own unique way of seeing and responding to the natural world, which played a vital role in William’s intellectual development. This essay traces the influence of Dorothy’s prose style on William’s poetry during 1798, analysing the complex interactions between observation, conversation and recollection that took place in the compositional processes of both writers.”