Ketcham, Carl H. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals, 1824–1835.” Wordsworth Circle 9.1 (Winter, 1978): 3–16.
“. . . Dorothy Wordsworth [in 1824] began keeping a daily record of her life at Rydal Mount and on her extended visits away from home – a record which lasted, with occasional interruptions, until her mental collapse in 1835. These journals, mostly unpublished, have attracted little attention: they cover a period when Wordsworth’s craftsmanship was uneventfully self-assured; they are scrawled and rather difficult to read; and they have been given a bad press by de Selincourt, who disparaged them as terse and uninformative. It is true that they are often, in effect, notes toward a journal – reminders of daily events which were often enough routine, and whose details Dorothy felt no need to set down in full. But they provide a faithful account of Dorothy’s later life in the poet’s household, with glimpses of William, his family and friends; they show that Dorothy, well into her middle years, vas still a tireless, active, sensitive observer, constantly in excited quest of new experiences; and finally, like the Liebestod which rounds Keats’s letters with a tragic period, they close the history of Dorothy’s long years of devotion with a decrescendo of sickness and pain, ending with the sudden darkening of her mind” (p. 3).
Dorothy Wordsworth 