Beer, John. “Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and the State of Trance.” Wordsworth Circle 8.2 (Spring, 1977): 121–38.
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.
Dyce — Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856)
Dyce, A. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers. New York : D. Appleton and Company, 1856.
Rogers joined the Wordsworths and Coleridge on their tour of Scotland. “I do indeed regret that Wordsworth has printed only fragments of his sister’s Journal: it is most excellent, and ought to have been published entire” (p. 206).
Digital version: Library of Congress.
Byatt — Unruly Times (1989)
Byatt, A. S. Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. London: Hogarth Press, 1989.
Frequent references to Dorothy Wordsworth; see index.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Digital version: Internet Archive.
Beaty — Dorothy Wordsworth and the Coleridges (1956)
Beaty, Frederick L. “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Coleridges: A New Letter.” Modern Language Review 51.3 (July 1956): 411–13.
Prints a letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to Josiah Wade 27 March 1814.
Gittings — Dorothy Wordsworth (1985)
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.
Aldrich — The Wordsworths and Coleridge (1962)
Aldrich, Ruth I. “The Wordsworths and Coleridge: ‘Three Persons,’ but Not ‘One Soul.’” Studies in Romanticism 2.1 (1962): 61–63.
An attempt to find the origin and context of the celebrated phrase “three persons and one soul”; Aldrich argues that it did not originate with Coleridge.
Armour — Coleridge the Talker (1940)
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.
Newlyn — William and Dorothy Wordsworth (2013)
Newlyn, Lucy. William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Contents: Homeless — Windy Brow and Racedown — Alfoxden — Hamburg — Goslar and Sockburn — Homecoming — Dwelling — The Grasmere Journal — The Orchard at Town End — Scotland — Grasmere and Coleorton — The Lake District — The Continent — Wanderlust — Rydal — Home — List of abbreviations — Notes. Bibliography — Index.
“Separated from William and Dorothy Wordsworth in December 1798—the year of the Lyrical Ballads—Coleridge wrote to his friends, ‘You have all in each other, but I am lonely, and want you.’ It was a revealing acknowledgement of the deep, almost exclusive intimacy that had by then developed between the siblings. Theirs was ‘a strange love, profound, almost dumb,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw.’ A suspicion of something illicit in the Wordsworths’ relationship began to circulate in their lifetime, and has had a habit of resurfacing. In this book, however, I am interested in the siblings’ cohabitation as evidence of their intense emotional and spiritual need, which arose out of circumstances unique to their family history” (p. xi).
Review: Cecily Erin Hill, Women’s Writing 21, no. 2 (2014): 278–80.
Second edition (paperback), 2016.
Introduction
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 