Tag: Dorothy Wordsworth

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Beattie-Smith — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland (2021)

Beattie-Smith, Gillian. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author (Dzienniki szkockie Dorothy Wordsworth: Kreacja autorki romantycznej).” Postscriptum Polonistyczne 27.1 (2021); 51–67.

Abstract: “The increase in popularity of the Home Tour in the 19th century and the publication of many journals, diaries, and guides of tours of Scotland by, such as, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, led to the perception of Scotland as a literary tour destination. The tour of Scotland invariably resulted in a journal in which identities such as writer, traveller, observer, were created. The text became a location for the pursuit of a sense of place and identity. For women in particular, the text offered opportunities to be accepted as a writer and commentator. Dorothy Wordsworth made two journeys to Scotland: the first, in 1803, with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second, in 1822 with Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Mary, her brother’s wife. This paper considers Dorothy’s identity constructed in those Scottish journals. Discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth have tended to consider her identity through familial relationship, and those of her writing by what is lacking in her work. Indeed, her work and her writing are frequently subsumed into the plural of ‘the Wordsworths’. This paper considers the creation of individual self in her work, and discusses the social and spatial construction of identity in Dorothy’s discourse in her journals about Scotland.”

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Armour — Coleridge the Talker (1940)

Armour, Richard W., and Raymond F. Howes. Coleridge the Talker: A Series of Contemporary Descriptions and Comments. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1940.

See “Dorothy Wordsworth: 1771–1855,” pp. 373–76.

“Coleridge has described the sympathetic union of himself and William and Dorothy Wordsworth as that of ‘three persons and one soul.’ Not the least person in that union was Dorothy, who supplied Coleridge with the companionship and understanding of which his wife was incapable. In their walks in the Quantocks she guided and sharpened his observation of nature, and was delighted with his responsiveness. On their first meeting, which occurred at Racedown in the spring of 1797, they were at once drawn to each other” (p. 373).

Copy: Library of Congress.

Digital copy: Google Books.

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Adcock — Grasmere Journals (2014)

Adcock, Fleur. “The Grasmere Journals: Dorothy Wordsworth.” London Library Magazine, no. 24 (Summer, 2014): 13.

“My visits [to the Lake District] these days are not very frequent, but Dorothy’s journal is established in my head: a refuge for whenever I may feel I’m in the wrong place.”

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Kasper  — Dorothy Wordsworth, Religion, and the Rydal Journals (2023)

Kasper, Emily Stephens. “Dorothy Wordsworth, Religion, and the Rydal Journals.” M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 2023.

Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s religious practices continued to evolve throughout her life. She was baptized Anglican, but after her mother’s death she resided with her mother’s cousin, where she practiced Unitarianism. When she later moved in with her uncle, she embraced evangelical Anglicanism. Records of her religious beliefs in her twenties are scarce, as after moving to Racedown with her brother William in 1795 and throughout her years living in Alfoxden, she rarely wrote of her involvement with organized religion. Only in the 1810s while at Grasmere did Dorothy Wordsworth begin to record a gradual return to church attendance. Concerning her religious practices in the years following this return, due to a relative lack of information concerning Dorothy Wordsworth’s spirituality during this period, scholars have concluded that her Anglicanism was unremarkable: groundbreaking biographer Ernest De Sélincourt called her faith a ‘simple orthodox piety’ (267) while Robert Gittings and Jo Manton labeled it ‘the conventional piety of her middle age’ (168). Often, scholars have also concluded that Dorothy Wordsworth’s Anglicanism was relatively orthodox, due to the outspoken High Churchmanship of her brothers William and Christopher. As this thesis demonstrates, however, Dorothy Wordsworth’s previously unpublished Rydal Journals complicate such conclusions. These journals offer a wealth of evidence concerning her religious practices and beliefs between 1825–35, including extensive lists of scripture references, records of her church attendance, logs of her religious reading, assessments of sermons, and expressions of her personal faith. The various findings suggest that Dorothy’s faith was more complex than previously understood, as it was passionate, informed, and, in ways, surprisingly evangelical.”

Available on the Web.

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Ashton — William and Dorothy (1938)

Ashton, Helen. William and Dorothy: A Novel of the Wordsworths. London: Collins, 1938; New York: Macmillan 1938.

Includes a short bibliography (pp. 3–4). “The first idea of this book was given to me by my sister, Katherine Davies, when we were collaborating in I Had a Sister (Lovat Dickson, 1937). It was she who suggested that Dorothy Wordsworth should be made the heroine of this novel” (p. 3).

Reprinted 1950, 1968, 1974.

An online version of the 1938 edition (New York) is available on HathiTrust.

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Bohls — Women Travel Writers (1995)

Bohls, Elizabeth A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

See Chap. 6, “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Cultural Politics of Scenic Tourism,” pp. 170–208.

Summary: “Dorothy Wordsworth is best known not for her travel journals, but for those she kept at home: at the cottage she shared with her brother William in Grasmere, in the heart of the scenic Lake District. The prevalent image of Wordsworth as something of a homebody, content to cook, clean, and copy poems for her more publicly ambitious brother, contrasts with Mary Wollstonecraft’s self-assertive, consciously politicized persona. Feminist critics have been intrigued by the contrast between the habitual, sometimes distressing self-effacement of the sister’s writing and the brother’s expansive Romantic ego. But Wordsworth’s treatment of aesthetic discourse in the journals and in her remarkable travel narrative, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, shares significant features with Wollstonecraft’s anti-aesthetics. Both writers disrupt and reconceptualize the aesthetic perception of land. Both are concerned with the practical realities of dwelling in a place and the ways in which these can or should influence perceptual pleasure, for those who dwell there and those who travel through. ¶ The Grasmere Journals take advantage of a particular conjuncture of material and cultural conditions to achieve, with understated grace, a textual integration of aesthetic and practical. Walking in the hills and enjoying their visual qualities takes its place for Wordsworth among the practices of housework, gardening, socializing, almsgiving, reading, and writing.”

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Death of Wordsworth’s Sister (16 February 1855)

“Death of Wordsworth’s Sister.” Elgin Courant and Morayshire Courier, 16 February 1855, p. 4.

Obituary. “The living links that unite us to poets of the first half of the present century are fast disappearing from among us. Last week added another of the many that have gone. Dorothy Wordsworth, the only sister of William Wordsworth, died at Rydal Mount in Westmoreland, on the 25th of January, in her eighty-fourth year.”

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Soderholm — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Return (1995)

Soderholm, James. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Return to Tintern Abbey.” New Literary History 26.2 (Spring, 1995): 309–22.

“After analyzing the last section of ‘Tintern Abbey,’ I will discuss [Dorothy Wordsworth’s poem] ‘Thoughts on my sick bed.’ I will argue that it replies directly to the hopes of futurity evoked in the last lines of her brother’s poem. Dorothy’s poem echoes her brother’s earlier works, borrowing from them as liberally as William once borrowed from her journals. The intermingling of poetic images helps us to reexamine the function of address and apostrophe: figural evocations of subjectivity produced by turning, and returning, to another person. I will conclude with a few remarks about the meaning of recent critical views of both Wordsworths” (p. 309).