Tag: Grasmere

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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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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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Introduction

Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) was known primarily as the younger sister of William Wordsworth and the author of some journals (which were not, however, published during her lifetime) that shed considerable light on his poetry. Though she rarely thought of herself as an author, Dorothy’s daily chronicles – especially from her earlier years – are compelling documents in their own right, and there is now widespread recognition that she is one of the more remarkable (yet self-effacing) personalities in the history of English literature.

I am attempting to bring together on this website a bibliography of books, articles, and dissertations about Dorothy Wordsworth (including, whenever possible, summaries of their contents), as well as records of her own writings. The emphasis will be on published sources, but I will also occasionally describe manuscript material and websites.

I should add that my original intention was to link to the online catalogue of the British Library for most of the entries, but the BL has not yet fully recovered from the 2023 cyber attack; hence I decided it was more sensible under these circumstances to connect to the Library of Congress catalogue whenever possible, though I still hope to add the BL catalogue information in the future.

If you wish to suggest additional titles (but bear in mind that this is a work still in progress), please get in touch with me at the address below.

William S. Peterson (wsp@umd.edu)