A BIBLIOGRAPHY
Glendening, John. The High Road: Romantic Tourism, Scotland, and Literature, 1720–1820. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Chapter 4 is devoted to Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, 1803 and her brother’s Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, A.D. 1803.
Copy: Library of Congress.
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.
Leask, Nigel. Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Abstract: “Stepping Westward is the first book dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720–1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century’s worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities. It pays attention to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book’s core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to ‘improve’ the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin’s picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of ‘home tours’ from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the ‘romantic Highlands’ were reinvented in Scott’s poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance, and emigration.”
See Chap 5: “‘Inhabited Solitudes’: Dorothy Wordsworth and the Legacy of the Picturesque Tour.”
Copy: Library of Congress.
Dyce, A. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers. New York : D. Appleton and Company, 1856.
Wolf, Alexis. “Shared Recollections: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Scottish Tour of 1803.” Studies in Romanticism 60.4 (2021): 401–417.
Andrews, Kerri. Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. London: Reaktion Books, 2021.
Abstract (back cover): “This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. In a series of intimate, incisive portraits, Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson’s daughter Elizabeth Carter – who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England – to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. Offering a beguiling, alternative view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing – of being – articulated by these ten pathfinding women.”
Contents: Foreword — Setting off — Elizabeth Carter — Dorothy Wordsworth — Ellen Weeton — Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt— Harriet Martineau — Virginia Woolf — Nan Shepherd — Anaïs Nin — Cheryl Strayed — Linda Cracknell and a female tradition — Coda — Appendix.
Beattie-Smith, Gillian. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author (Dzienniki szkockie Dorothy Wordsworth: Kreacja autorki romantycznej).” Postscriptum Polonistyczne 27.1 (2021); 51–67.
Abstract: “The increase in popularity of the Home Tour in the 19th century and the publication of many journals, diaries, and guides of tours of Scotland by, such as, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, led to the perception of Scotland as a literary tour destination. The tour of Scotland invariably resulted in a journal in which identities such as writer, traveller, observer, were created. The text became a location for the pursuit of a sense of place and identity. For women in particular, the text offered opportunities to be accepted as a writer and commentator. Dorothy Wordsworth made two journeys to Scotland: the first, in 1803, with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second, in 1822 with Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Mary, her brother’s wife. This paper considers Dorothy’s identity constructed in those Scottish journals. Discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth have tended to consider her identity through familial relationship, and those of her writing by what is lacking in her work. Indeed, her work and her writing are frequently subsumed into the plural of ‘the Wordsworths’. This paper considers the creation of individual self in her work, and discusses the social and spatial construction of identity in Dorothy’s discourse in her journals about Scotland.”
Bohls, Elizabeth A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
See Chap. 6, “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Cultural Politics of Scenic Tourism,” pp. 170–208.
Summary: “Dorothy Wordsworth is best known not for her travel journals, but for those she kept at home: at the cottage she shared with her brother William in Grasmere, in the heart of the scenic Lake District. The prevalent image of Wordsworth as something of a homebody, content to cook, clean, and copy poems for her more publicly ambitious brother, contrasts with Mary Wollstonecraft’s self-assertive, consciously politicized persona. Feminist critics have been intrigued by the contrast between the habitual, sometimes distressing self-effacement of the sister’s writing and the brother’s expansive Romantic ego. But Wordsworth’s treatment of aesthetic discourse in the journals and in her remarkable travel narrative, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, shares significant features with Wollstonecraft’s anti-aesthetics. Both writers disrupt and reconceptualize the aesthetic perception of land. Both are concerned with the practical realities of dwelling in a place and the ways in which these can or should influence perceptual pleasure, for those who dwell there and those who travel through. ¶ The Grasmere Journals take advantage of a particular conjuncture of material and cultural conditions to achieve, with understated grace, a textual integration of aesthetic and practical. Walking in the hills and enjoying their visual qualities takes its place for Wordsworth among the practices of housework, gardening, socializing, almsgiving, reading, and writing.”
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.
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.
Dorothy Wordsworth 