Tag: Grasmere journal

Posted on

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).

Posted on

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.”

Posted on

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.”

Copy: Web.

Posted on

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.
Posted on

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.”
Posted on

Comitini — More Than Half a Poet (2003)

Comitini, Patricia. ‘“More Than Half A Poet”: Vocational Philanthropy in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals.’” European Romantic Review 14.3 (2003): 307–22.

“The way criticism has treated Dorothy Wordsworth has all to do with the way she represents herself, her writing, and her brother in her journals. Scholars have labored to understand the function of the Grasmere Journal and of “Dorothy Wordsworth” as a representation of nineteenth-century womanhood. Whether characterizing her as a domestic subject, novice writer or helpmate, scholarship has focused primarily on her failure to realize herself, develop her talent, or establish her own home” (p. 307).
Posted on

Bennett — William Wordsworth in Context (2015)

Bennett, Andrew, ed. William Wordsworth in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

See Chap. 3, “Dorothy Wordsworth,” by Judith W. Page, pp. 19–26. “The Grasmere journal gives us a window into William’s life and work, but a view that is controlled by Dorothy and often complicates or contradicts the self-presentation in the poems and prefaces” (p. 20).

Slightly incomplete PDF of the chapter: Google Books.

Copy: Library of Congress.
Posted on

Wordsworth, Dorothy — Grasmere Journal (2016)

Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journal 1800–1803. London: Folio Society, 2016.

With an introduction by Lucy Newlyn. Illustrated by Georgia Bennett.

“The Grasmere Journal was first published in book form in 1897, edited by William Knight, although substantial extracts had appeared in his The Life of William Wordsworth in 1889. This Folio edition is based on that of the 1941 edition published by Macmillan & Co. Ltd and edited by Ernest de Selincourt, with minor emendations and revisions” (title-page verso).

Review: Sian Cain, Guardian, 25 April 2026 [Web].