A BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rogers, John E., Jr. “‘Dearest Friend’: A Study of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals.” Dissertation Abstracts International 35 (1973): 1632–A33A (Ph.D. thesis, Pennsylvania State University).
Contents: I. Companion Never Lost: Introduction; II. The Gentler Spring; III. Thy Wild Eyes: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Vision; IV. The Art of Dorothy Wordsworth; V. Wordsworth and His Exquisite Sister; VI. The Meaning of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals; VIII. Conclusion; Bibliography.
Dugas, Kristine Ann. “Literary Journals: Explorations in a Private Literary Form.” Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1984.
“The study focusses on three nineteenth-century journal writers–Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The chapters represent three tendencies in journal composition. . . . The chapters on Dorothy Wordsworth represent those journals which best reveal both the emergence of the metaphoric from the literal and the psychodynamics of a woman writer’s creativity. Wordsworth’s early journals reveal how the course of her imaginative writing was eventually deflected by the informal nature of her work, by its collaborative and exploratory genesis, and by its deliberately contextual design.”
Elzey, Susan Dean. “The Differences between Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals and William Wordsworth’s Poetry: Applying the Principles of ‘Preface.’” M.A. thesis, Longwood College, May 2002.
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.
Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
See J. H. McGavran, Jr., “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals – Putting Herself Down,” pp. 230–53.
Beattie-Smith, Gillian. “Dorothy Wordsworth: Tours of Scotland, 1803 and 1822.” Northern Scotland 10.1 (May 2019): 20–40.
Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s name, writing, and identity as an author are frequently subsumed in the plural of ‘The Wordsworths’, in her relationship as the sister of the poet, William Wordsworth. But Dorothy was a Romantic author in her own right. She wrote poetry, narratives, and journals. Nine of her journals have been published. In 1803, and again in 1822, she toured Scotland and recorded her journeys in Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland and Journal of My Second Tour in Scotland. This article considers Dorothy’s two Scottish journals. It discusses them in the light of historical and literary contexts, and places of memorial.”
Dorothy Wordsworth 