Tag: Grasmere journal

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Lafford — Dorothy Wordsworth and the Writing of Resolve (2022)

Lafford, Erin. “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Writing of Resolve.” Cambridge Quarterly 5.13 (September 2022): 207–24.

Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal is a text framed self-consciously as the result of her ‘resolve’ to write it. When studied carefully, this term captures at once a capacity for firm intention and steadfastness of purpose, and the potential for lapse and dissolution; Wordsworth’s journal holds both senses in play as it forms an index of habitual life. Reading the journal alongside two rich sites of reflection on the psychophysiological contours of habit—household management and domestic health regimen—invites attention towards it as a more capacious form for tracing the fluctuating nature of self-control than perhaps her brother’s Romantic lyric.”

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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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