Tag: illness

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Meiners — Reading Pain (1993)

Meiners, Katherine T. “Reading Pain and the Feminine Body in Romantic Writing: The Examples of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge.” Centennial Review 37.3 (Fall, 1993): 487–512.

“Romantic encounters with illness and pain precipitate crises of intelligibility, moments when intense pain makes a sufferer unintelligible to others as much as to herself. The nineteenth-century witnesses an increased tendency to professionalize such suffering and turn pain into an event to be objectified and co-opted by other intelligibilities, including those of poetry and medicine. This essay will address Romantic understanding as a complex cultural practice greater than the making of literature which is inclined to seek its remedies for human suffering outside the medical disciplines as much as within them” (p. 487).

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Grinnell — Age of Hypochondria (2010)

Grinnell, George C. The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Advertisement: “Examining the ways in which hypochondria forms both a malady and a metaphor for a range of British Romantic writers, Grinnell contends that this is not one illness amongst many, but a disorder of the very ability to distinguish between illness and health, a malady of interpretation that mediates a broad spectrum of pressing cultural questions.”

See index.

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Atkin — Recovering Dorothy (2021)

Atkin, Polly. Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth. Salford: Saraband, 2021.

Abstract: “The first book to focus on Dorothy Wordsworth’s later life and work and the impact of her disability – allowing her to step out from her brother’s shadow and back into her own life story. Dorothy Wordsworth is well known as the author of the Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals (1798–1803) and as the sister of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. She is widely praised for her nature writing and is often remembered as a woman of great physical vitality. Less well known, however, is that Dorothy became seriously ill in 1829 and was mostly housebound for the last twenty years of her life. Her personal letters and unpublished journals from this time paint a portrait of a compassionate and creative woman who made her sickroom into a garden for herself and her pet robin and who finally grew to call herself a poet. They also reveal how vital Dorothy was to her brother’s success, and the closeness they shared as siblings. By re-examining her life through the perspective of her illness, this biography allows Dorothy Wordsworth to step out from her brother’s shadow and back into her own life story.”
 

Contents: 1. Many Dorothies — 2. Dorothy and the Creative Household — 3. Five years of Sickness and of Pain — 4. Sickbed Consolations — 5. Lost fragments Shall Remain — 6. Undiagnosing Dorothy — 7. Dorothy’s Symptoms. — Coda: Finding Dorothy.

Review: Nicola Healey, European Romantic Review 34.1 (February 2023): 76–90.

For an interview with Atkin about her book, see Lucy Writers.

Copies: Library of Congress. — Wordsworth Trust (Reference 2022.23).
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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).