A BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dyce, A. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers. New York : D. Appleton and Company, 1856.
Byatt, A. S. Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. London: Hogarth Press, 1989.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Batho, Edith C. The Later Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; New York: Macmillan, 1933.
Digital version (1963): Internet Archive.
For references to Dorothy Wordsworth, see index.
Reviews: H. J. C. Grierson, Modern Language Review 29.2 (1934): 199–208; Edith J. Morley, Review of English Studies 10 (April 1938): 238–242.
Gittings, Robert, and Jo Manton. Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
“The last scholarly biography of Dorothy Wordsworth, written by Ernest de Selincourt, appeared over fifty years ago. Despite the great merits of this work, a new Life must be needed to take into account much that has emerged in the past five decades, and, in particular, more recent editing and scholarship” (p. vii).
Contents: List of plates — 1. “Dear Aunt” — 2. “Poor Dolly” — 3. “The Oeconomy of Charity” — 4. “The character and virtues of my Brother” — 5. “The First Home” — 6. “Coleridge’s Society” — 7. “Lyrical Ballads”— 8. “Wild, sequestered valley” — 9. “Plenty of Business” — 10. “Either joy or sorrow” — 11. “My tears will flow” — 12. “I shall always date Grasmere” — 13. “Those innocent children” — 14. “The Ambleside Gentry” — 15. “Dear Antelope” — 16. “We all want Miss W.” — 17. “This quiet room” — 18. “Oftener merry than sad” — Appendix One — Appendix Two — Notes — Bibliography — Index.
Reviews: Joyce Johnson, Washington Post, Book World, 1 September 1985, p. 5; Leon Waldoff, Modern Language Review 83.1 (1988): 157.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Digital copy: Internet Archive.
Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press; Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1989.
For references to DW, see index.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Digital copy: Internet Archive.
Armour, Richard W., and Raymond F. Howes. Coleridge the Talker: A Series of Contemporary Descriptions and Comments. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1940.
See “Dorothy Wordsworth: 1771–1855,” pp. 373–76.
“Coleridge has described the sympathetic union of himself and William and Dorothy Wordsworth as that of ‘three persons and one soul.’ Not the least person in that union was Dorothy, who supplied Coleridge with the companionship and understanding of which his wife was incapable. In their walks in the Quantocks she guided and sharpened his observation of nature, and was delighted with his responsiveness. On their first meeting, which occurred at Racedown in the spring of 1797, they were at once drawn to each other” (p. 373).
Copy: Library of Congress.
Digital copy: Google Books.
Beatty, Frederika. William Wordsworth of Dove Cottage: A Study of the Poet’s Most Productive Decade, June 1797–May 1807. New York: Bookman Associates, Inc., 1964.
Extensive references to Dorothy Wordsworth and her journals.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Digital copy: Internet Archive.
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.
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)
Dorothy Wordsworth 