Tag: Dorothy Wordsworth

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Cervelli — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology (2007)

Cervelli, Kenneth R. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Contents:  Introduction — 1. Bringing It All Back Home: The Ecology of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals — 2. The High Road Home: Paths to Ecology in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland — 3. The Illuminated Earth: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecopoetry — 4. “More Allied to Human Life”: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Communion with the Dead — Conclusion: Trapped in the Weather of the Days: Dorothy Wordsworth in Her Environment — Notes — Bibliography — Index.

Summary (from the Routledge website): “Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere), these journals have proven especially useful for readers wanting a more intimate glimpse of arguably the most important poet of the Romantic period. ¶ With the rise of women’s studies in the 1980s, however, came a shift in critical perspective. Scholars such as Margaret Homans and Susan Levin revaluated Dorothy’s work on its own terms, as well as in relation to other female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of a larger shift in the academy, feminist-oriented analyses of Dorothy’s writings take their place alongside other critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and into the next decade. ¶ One such approach, ecocriticism, closely parallels Dorothy’s changing critical fortunes in the mid-to-late 1980s. Curiously, however, the major ecocritical investigations of the Romantic period all but ignore Dorothy’s work while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between ecocriticism and feminism. The present study situates Dorothy in an ongoing ecocritical dialogue through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.”

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Benstock — Private Self (1988)

Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

See J. H. McGavran, Jr., “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals – Putting Herself Down,” pp. 230–53.

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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).

Copy on Web: PDF.

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Newlyn — William and Dorothy Wordsworth (2013)

Newlyn, Lucy. William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Contents: Homeless — Windy Brow and Racedown — Alfoxden — Hamburg — Goslar and Sockburn — Homecoming — Dwelling — The Grasmere Journal — The Orchard at Town End — Scotland — Grasmere and Coleorton — The Lake District — The Continent — Wanderlust — Rydal — Home — List of abbreviations — Notes. Bibliography — Index.

“Separated from William and Dorothy Wordsworth in December 1798—the year of the Lyrical Ballads—Coleridge wrote to his friends, ‘You have all in each other, but I am lonely, and want you.’ It was a revealing acknowledgement of the deep, almost exclusive intimacy that had by then developed between the siblings. Theirs was ‘a strange love, profound, almost dumb,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw.’ A suspicion of something illicit in the Wordsworths’ relationship began to circulate in their lifetime, and has had a habit of resurfacing. In this book, however, I am interested in the siblings’ cohabitation as evidence of their intense emotional and spiritual need, which arose out of circumstances unique to their family history” (p. xi).

Review: Cecily Erin Hill, Women’s Writing 21, no. 2 (2014): 278–80.

Second edition (paperback), 2016.

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Gibson —  Illness of Dorothy Wordsworth (1982)

Gibson, Iris I. J. M. “Illness of Dorothy Wordsworth.” British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Edition) 285 (18–25 December 1982): 1813–15.

“I regard her [migraine] attacks as multifactorial in origin, due to considerable physical and mental activity, to the stress of William’s problems and struggles with composition, and her undue anxiety about him” (p. 1813).

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Beattie-Smith — Dorothy Wordsworth: Tours of Scotland (2019)⁠

Beattie-Smith, Gillian. “Dorothy Wordsworth: Tours of Scotland, 1803 and 1822.” Northern Scotland 10.1 (May 2019): 20–40.

Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s name, writing, and identity as an author are frequently subsumed in the plural of ‘The Wordsworths’, in her relationship as the sister of the poet, William Wordsworth. But Dorothy was a Romantic author in her own right. She wrote poetry, narratives, and journals. Nine of her journals have been published. In 1803, and again in 1822, she toured Scotland and recorded her journeys in Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland and Journal of My Second Tour in Scotland. This article considers Dorothy’s two Scottish journals. It discusses them in the light of historical and literary contexts, and places of memorial.”

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Dennis — Dorothy Wordsworth (1889)

Dennis, John. “Dorothy Wordsworth.” Leisure Hour, December 1889, pp. 121–25.

“The name of Dorothy Wordsworth is inseparably associated with that of her brother. What he owed to her self-denying affection, to her rare intellect, and to her profound love of Nature, the poet has acknowledged in words as familiar as they are beautiful. This ‘beloved sister,’ at the most critical period of Wordsworth’s early manhood, came to him with the ‘healing power’ which his noble verse has given so largely to others. . . . Her influence was abiding. She had herself a poet’s soul without his faculty of singing; and to her inspiring sympathy, expended without a thought of self, we are indebted for some of her brother’s finest poems” (p. 121).

Available on the Web.