Darlington, Beth, ed. The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981; London: Chatto and Windus, 1982.
Frequent references to Dorothy Wordsworth; see index.
Gilpin — Critical Essays on William Wordsworth (1990)
Gilpin, George H., ed. Critical Essays on William Wordsworth. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1990.
See Donald H. Reiman, “Poetry of Familiarity: Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Mary Hutchinson,” pp. 237–67.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Digital copy: Internet Archive.
Wordsworth, Mary — Letters (1958)
Wordsworth, Mary. The Letters of Mary Wordsworth 1800–1855. Ed. Mary E. Burton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.
See index.
Copy: Internet Archive.
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.
Duffin — Dorothy Wordsworth (1955)
Duffin, H. C. “Dorothy Wordsworth.” Contemporary Review 187 (January 1955): 47–51.
“Even apart from its pitiful ending, Dorothy Wordsworth’s life was a tragedy. No one can blame Wordsworth for marrying, but his marriage to Mary Hutchinson was a betrayal of Dorothy, and the ruin it made of her life was reflected in his poetry. The sight of the gradual death, in Dorothy, of the brilliant happiness that had been hers, and his, before 1802, poisoned his own happiness, and hence the springs of poetry in him” (p. 50).
Web: Internet Archive.
Fennimore — Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect (2024)
Fennimore, Eve Dixon. “‘Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Revisiting’ on the 1820 Continental Tour.” Criterion 17.1 (Winter, 2024): 89–103.
Abstract: “This paper argues that Dorothy Wordsworth, in her often overlooked Journal of a Tour on the Continent, was essentially ‘revisiting’ places that she was viewing for the first time, as she had visited them secondhand through William’s stories and writings about them. In 1820, Dorothy, William, and Mary Wordsworth embarked on a tour of the continent in the inverse direction of William’s youthful 1790 trip. For thirty years, Dorothy had heard stories and read about his experiences, building up an image in her mind of what the Continent would be like which changed her own exploration of the sights. By exploring Dorothy’s tour as a form of revisiting, we see how imagining a place before physically seeing it shapes the viewing experience, blurring the line between reality and imagination. Further, a close study of Dorothy’s journal illustrates the impermanence of sites and travelers as they inevitably change over time.”
Boden — Matrilineal Journalism (1998)
Boden, Helen. “Matrilineal Journalism: Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental Tours and the Female Sublime.” Women’s Writing 5.3 (1998): 329–352.
“This article introduces Mary Wordsworth as a travel writer, and contributes to the growing debate about the ‘female sublime’ by suggesting how the sublime is used, in slightly different ways, by Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth to interrogate the nature of writing and representation.”
Newlyn — Vital Stream (2019)
Newlyn, Lucy. Vital Stream. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2019.
Abstract: “A work of historical fiction, an experiment in life writing and a verse drama designed to be read aloud. Vital Stream takes the form of a long sonnet sequence, revisiting six extraordinary months in 1802 – a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Parted when they were very young, the siblings had eventually set up home together in the Lake District, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. After two years in Grasmere, William became engaged to Mary Hutchinson. There followed an intense period of re-adjustment for all three, and for his former lover Annette Vallon, who had borne him a daughter he had never met. During 1802 the Wordsworth siblings wrote some of their most beautiful work; these were their last months of living alone, and their writing has an elegiac quality. Their journey to see Annette Vallon and meet William’s daughter for the first time took them through London to Calais during the brief Peace of Amiens, involving a careful dissociation from his past. Other complications coloured their lives, to do with Coleridge and his failing marriage. Lucy Newlyn draws all this material into the vital stream of her sequence.”
With a Foreword by Richard Holmes.
Paperback. Published in association with the Wordsworth Trust.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Butler — William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1997)
Butler, James A. “William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘Emma,’ and a German Translation in the Alfoxden Notebook.” Studies in Romanticism 36.2 (Summer, 1997): 157–71.
“The Alfoxden Notebook, now at the Wordsworth Library in Grasmere, is one of the central documents of the English Romantic Movement, for in that Notebook, William Wordsworth, early in 1798, developed his conceptions of the union and harmony of all things, of the mind’s creative interplay with the natural world. Of the many passages scholars have pored over in the Alfoxden Notebook, one text, though it has received scant attention, sheds light on William and his sister Dorothy in their crisis year of 1802. Within the Notebook appears (in a German script which makes it difficult to identify the writer by penmanship) a translation of William’s ‘The Two April Mornings,’ headed ‘Die zwey Aprilmorgens.’ But careful examination of this hitherto-unpublished translation shows Dorothy Wordsworth to have written the work early in 1802, shortly after William and Mary Hutchinson decided to wed. Dorothy’s selection of this poem to translate not only illuminates her emotional state in 1802 but also the complex interrelationships of works mentioning ‘Emma’ (William’s name for Dorothy in his poetry) written in 1798, 1800, and 1802” (p. 157).
Cavendish — Death of Dorothy Wordsworth (2005)
Cavendish, Richard. “Death of Dorothy Wordsworth: January 25th, 1855.” History Today 55.1 (January 2005): 55.
“Dorothy Wordsworth lies buried in one of the most beautiful churchyards in England, at Grasmere in the Lake District, with her brother William, his wife Mary, and other members of the family. She is remembered for her delightful diaries, which were not published until years after her death.”
Available on the Web.
Dorothy Wordsworth 