Tag: prose

Posted on

Walker — Dorothy Wordsworth (1988)

Walker, Eric. C. “Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, and the Kirkstone Pass.” Wordsworth Circle 19.3 (June 1988): 116–21.

“I offer these various Kirkstone texts as an example of a generally overlooked connection between the two writers, and I want to suggest that it is still useful to study William’s texts that are subsequent to and dependent upon Dorothy’s texts, not to assemble wrongheaded evidence of the better writer Dorothy Wordsworth could not be, but simply to begin to assemble in a systematic way the evidence of how Dorothy Wordsworth’s prose has been read” (p. 116).

Copy: Library of Congress.

Posted on

Cervelli — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology (2007)

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.