Tag: Library of Congress

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Gunn — Passion for the Particular (1981)

Gunn, Elizabeth. A Passion for the Particular. Dorothy Wordsworth: A Portrait. London: Victor Gollancz, 1981.

Dust-jacket: “. . . The facts of Dorothy’s life (1771–1855) are well known, but some facets of her character less so. Though she shared the hardships as well as the exaltation of her brother’s early years at Racedown, Alfoxden, Grasmere, and was the mainstay of his family after he married in 1802, hers was never a passive role: she was no mere handmaiden to poets . . . but a full partner in William’s activities and his eventual poetic triumph, and was often the dominant moral force in their daily existence.”

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Wordsworth, Dorothy — Recollections of a Tour (1997)

Wordsworth, Dorothy. Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland. Ed. Carol Kyros Walker. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

Abstract: “In the late summer and early autumn of 1803, Dorothy Wordsworth undertook an extraordinary 663-mile journey through the Scottish Lowlands and southwestern Highlands, with her brother William and, for a short time, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. On their return home, she recorded, with warmth, wit and crisp imagery, her recollections of the adventures, sights and unspoiled, romantic landscape of the tour. Her engaging ‘journal’ is now republished in this beautiful volume that provides remarkable black-and-white photographs of the Scottish scenes described. Carol Kyros Walker has captured the essence of these places in a photographic essay that follows each week of Wordsworth’s recollections. Walker also contributes an introduction to locate events of the journey within their historical setting and to explain the significance of this trip for the three participants; a discussion of Dorothy Wordsworth’s skills as a writer; extensive notes to clarify her many allusions; and a map of the itinerary.”

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Worthen — The Gang (2001)

Worthen, John. The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Abstract: “‘A Night or two after a worse Rogue there came, The head of the Gang, one Wordsworth by name . . .’ — Coleridge, A Soliloquy of the full Moon, April 1802. ¶ Over a dramatic six-month period in 1802, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, and the two Hutchinson sisters Sara and Mary formed a close-knit group whose members saw or wrote to one another constantly. Coleridge, whose marriage was collapsing, was in love with Sara, and Wordsworth was about to be married to Mary, who would be moving in beside Dorothy in their Grasmere cottage. Throughout this extraordinary period both poets worked on some of their finest and most familiar poems, Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. In this fascinating book, John Worthen recreates the group’s intertwined lives and the effect they had on one another. ¶ Drawing on the group’s surviving letters, and poems, as well as Dorothy’s diaries, Worthen throws new light on many old problems. He examines the prehistory of the events of 1802, the dynamics of the group between March and July, the summer of 1802, when Wordsworth and Dorothy visited Calais to see his ex-mistress and his daughter Caroline, and the wedding between Wordsworth and Mary in October of that year. In an epilogue he looks forward to the ways in which relationships changed during 1803, concentrating on a single day, 11 January 1803, in the lives of the group.”

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Leask — Stepping Westward (2020)

Leask, Nigel. Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Abstract: “Stepping Westward is the first book dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720–1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century’s worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities. It pays attention to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book’s core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to ‘improve’ the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin’s picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of ‘home tours’ from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the ‘romantic Highlands’ were reinvented in Scott’s poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance, and emigration.”

See Chap 5: “‘Inhabited Solitudes’: Dorothy Wordsworth and the Legacy of the Picturesque Tour.”

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Carr — Feather and Bone (2018)

Carr, Ruth. Feather and Bone: Poems in Response to Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855), Mary Ann McCracken (1770–1866). Dublin: Arlen House, 2018.

Abstract: “Carr’s poems explore the lives of two women who lived contemporaneously but never met—Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Ann McCracken. The poems reflect how they lived their lives alongside their more famous brothers, with Mary Ann’s political strength carrying her through tragedy and Dorothy’s calmer ‘foxglove feeling’ for life.”

For an interview with Carr about her book, see The Honest Ulsterman, September 2024.

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).