Tag: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Wilson — Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008)

Wilson, Frances. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life. London: Faber and Faber, 2008.

Abstract on jacket (American edition): “Described by the writer and opium addict Thomas De Quincey as ‘the very wildest . . . person I have ever known,’ Dorothy Wordsworth was neither the self-effacing spinster nor the sacrificial saint of common telling. A brilliant stylist in her own right, Dorothy was at the center of the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. She was her brother William Wordsworth’s inspiration, aide, and most valued reader, and a friend to Coleridge; both borrowed from her observations of the world for their own poems. ¶ In order to remain at her brother’s side, Dorothy sacrificed both marriage and comfort, jealously guarding their close-knit domesticity – one marked by a startling freedom from social convention. In the famed Grasmere Journals, Dorothy kept a record of this idyllic life together. The tale that unfolds through her brief, electric entries reveals an intense bond between brother and sister, culminating in Dorothy’s dramatic collapse on the day of William’s wedding to their childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy lived out the rest of her years with her brother and Mary. The woman who strode the hills in all hours and all weathers would eventually retreat into the house for the last three decades of her life. ¶ In this biography, Frances Wilson reveals Dorothy in all her complexity. From the coiled tension of Dorothy’s journals, she unleashes the rich emotional life of a woman determined to live on her own terms, and honors her impact on the key figures of Romanticism.”

Contents: Introduction. Crossing the Threshold. — 1. For Richer or Poorer: Longing — 2. To Have and to Hold: Home — 3. In Sickness and in Health: Headaches — 4. To Forsake All Others: Incest — 5. To Honour and Obey: Nature — 6. For Better for Worse: Honeymoon — 7. Until Death Do Us Part — Note on the Publication History of the Grasmere Journal.

Reviews: Mark Bostridge, Independent, 9 March 2008. —Dwight Garner, “A Brother’s Keeper: The Other Wordsworth,” New York Times, 24 February 2009. [Web] — Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor, 16 April 2009, p. 17.
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Dugas — Literary Journals (1992)

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.”

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Jarvis — Romanic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (1997)

Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

“Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel is an exploration of the relationship between walking and writing. Robin Jarvis here reconstructs the scene of walking, both in Britain and on the Continent, in the 1790s, and analyses the mentality and motives of the early pedestrian traveller. He then discusses the impact of this cultural revolution on the creativity of major Romantic writers, focusing especially on William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, Keats, Hazlitt and Hunt. In readings which engage current debates around literature and travel, landscape aesthetics, ecocriticism, the poetics of gender, and the materiality of Romantic discourse, Jarvis demonstrates how walking became not only a powerful means of self-enfranchisement but also the focus of restless textual energies.”

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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Mallaby — Dorothy Wordsworth (1950)

Mallaby, George. “Dorothy Wordsworth: The Perfect Sister.” The Atlantic 186.6 (December 1950): 81–83.

“We, who are alive, hardly know when we are happy. We are always looking ahead, thinking, or at least hoping, that ‘the best is yet to be.’ When we ponder and judge the lives of dead men, we say to ourselves, taking credit for the acuteness of our intellectual perception, ‘That was the climax of their happiness; in those years they lived to the full.’ There are no three persons, at least in the history of literature, about whom it is easier thus to express ourselves, than about Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister Dorothy. Even in their own lifetimes they knew that from 1797 to 1802 they shared a lustrum of sympathy and love and achievement which were proof against worldly accidents and tribulations. In that golden period these three persons were an undivided and indivisible trinity. When the triune spell was broken each of them failed – Coleridge fell into a self-deceiving idleness, morbid imaginings of jealousy and mistrust, an opiate confusion of mind and heart; Wordsworth, arming himself with the shield of a rather self-righteous duty, moved boldly but remorsefully away from ‘the vision splendid’; Dorothy, overburdened with household cares and perplexed with spiritual disappointments and dismay, surrendered to a senseless melancholy” (p. 81).

Text: Web.

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Wordsworth, Dorothy — Grasmere Journals (1991)

Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journals. Ed. Pamela Woof. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Publisher’s description: “This is perhaps one of the best-loved journals in English literature. Dorothy Wordsworth began it in 1800 to give her poet-brother pleasure, and for three years she noted walks and weather, friends, and neighbors on the roads of Grasmere. The journals tell of Wordsworth’s marriage, the Wordworths’ concern for Coleridge, and of the composition of poetry. For this edition, the original manuscripts have been freshly edited, yielding new readings of previously misread or undeciphered words, and restoring Dorothy Wordsworth’s hasty punctuation. Woof supplies a rich commentary, illuminating every aspect of this marvellous personal record.”

Reviews: Douglas Hewitt, Notes and Queries 39.3 (1992): 400; Nicola Trott, Wordsworth Circle 23.4 (1992): 213–14.

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Broughton — Some Letters of the Wordsworth Family (1942)

Broughton, Leslie N., ed. Some Letters of the Wordsworth Family, Now First Published with a Few Unpublished Letters of Coleridge and Southey and Others. (Cornell Studies in English, vol. 32.) Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1942.

“In December 1940 the Wordsworth Collection of the Cornell University Library was fortunate in securing from the firm of Sotheby in London forty-three letters from Wordsworth and members of his family to George Huntly Gordon, nearly all of which hitherto have remained unpublished” (p. vii).

Frequent references to Dorothy Wordsworth and several of her letters; see index.

Copy: Library of Congress.

Digital copy: Internet Archive.