A BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rogers, John E., Jr. “‘Dearest Friend’: A Study of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals.” Dissertation Abstracts International 35 (1973): 1632–A33A (Ph.D. thesis, Pennsylvania State University).
Contents: I. Companion Never Lost: Introduction; II. The Gentler Spring; III. Thy Wild Eyes: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Vision; IV. The Art of Dorothy Wordsworth; V. Wordsworth and His Exquisite Sister; VI. The Meaning of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals; VIII. Conclusion; Bibliography.
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.”
Kincaid-Ehlers, Elizabeth. “Blue Woman on a Green Field: A Consideration of Dorothy Wordsworth.” Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1976): 2291A–92A.
University of Rochester thesis.
Cook, Kay Kellam. “‘I Will Not Quarrel with Myself’: Dorothy Wordsworth, Subjectivity, and Romantic Autobiography.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Colorado—Boulder, 1991.
Abstract: “This dissertation proposes a theory of women’s private writings through an examination of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal (1800–1803) and Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803). Additionally, I address the place of private writings in current critical discussions of literature and identity in early nineteenth-century England. Locating Dorothy Wordsworth in the Romantic movement and within the tradition of autobiography of necessity complicates theories and assessments of both. Following an introduction to my own theory of the journal as genre and a contextualization of that theory in other critical approaches, I look at Dorothy Wordsworth’s choice of the journal form to record her experiences as a strategical act that deflects the male (William’s) gaze. I then examine the subjectifying strategies within that form—amatory discourse, the locative impulse, perceptual experimentation—that work toward creating a self that often resists the unified impulse of much hegemonic self-writing, best exemplified by her brother’s autobiographical work, The Prelude. Within the critical framework that I identify—parataxis, immersion, fragmentation, and detail—I examine specific passages in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals that exemplify how the genre permits experimentation and expression counter to the dominant approaches of autobiography. ¶ An analysis of Wordsworth’s Tour, which follows, is placed in the context of travel literature in the early nineteenth century. My purpose is to examine generic differences between the private journal and the more public tour, to make distinctions between the categories of the sublime and the picturesque in the Tour, and to introduce a third category of perception, ‘singular absorption,’ which is particularly amenable to the immersive strategies in Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings. ¶ The conclusion emphasizes that ignoring private life writings in theories of autobiography or of notions of identity in the early nineteenth century results in incomplete assessments of either.”
Oakley, Sandra Sue. “An Evaluation of the Writings of Dorothy Wordsworth.” M.S. thesis, Eastern Illinois University, 1964.
Kasper, Emily Stephens. “Dorothy Wordsworth, Religion, and the Rydal Journals.” M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 2023.
Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s religious practices continued to evolve throughout her life. She was baptized Anglican, but after her mother’s death she resided with her mother’s cousin, where she practiced Unitarianism. When she later moved in with her uncle, she embraced evangelical Anglicanism. Records of her religious beliefs in her twenties are scarce, as after moving to Racedown with her brother William in 1795 and throughout her years living in Alfoxden, she rarely wrote of her involvement with organized religion. Only in the 1810s while at Grasmere did Dorothy Wordsworth begin to record a gradual return to church attendance. Concerning her religious practices in the years following this return, due to a relative lack of information concerning Dorothy Wordsworth’s spirituality during this period, scholars have concluded that her Anglicanism was unremarkable: groundbreaking biographer Ernest De Sélincourt called her faith a ‘simple orthodox piety’ (267) while Robert Gittings and Jo Manton labeled it ‘the conventional piety of her middle age’ (168). Often, scholars have also concluded that Dorothy Wordsworth’s Anglicanism was relatively orthodox, due to the outspoken High Churchmanship of her brothers William and Christopher. As this thesis demonstrates, however, Dorothy Wordsworth’s previously unpublished Rydal Journals complicate such conclusions. These journals offer a wealth of evidence concerning her religious practices and beliefs between 1825–35, including extensive lists of scripture references, records of her church attendance, logs of her religious reading, assessments of sermons, and expressions of her personal faith. The various findings suggest that Dorothy’s faith was more complex than previously understood, as it was passionate, informed, and, in ways, surprisingly evangelical.”
Available on the Web.
Smith, Amanda Ricks. “Meteorological Time in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rydal Journal,” M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 2018.
Abstract: “This thesis deals with Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rydal Journal, a journal written between 1824 and 1835, when Dorothy Wordsworth was between ages 53 and 64. . . . I will begin by offering a short history of timekeeping before and during the Wordsworths’ lifetimes, focusing particularly on the degree to which tracking and standardizing minutes and hours was becoming commonplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From there, I will show how, in contrast to this trend toward mechanical timekeeping, Dorothy processed time primarily through natural and climatological cycles and events during the Rydal Journal years. Dorothy’s apparent rejection of clock time seems to be related to her reliance on nature, for weather time was much more lyrical than mechanical time.”
Available on Web.
Oakley, Sandra Sue. “An Evaluation of the Writings of Dorothy Wordsworth.” M.S. thesis, Eastern Illinois University, 1964.
“William Wordsworth was not a self-made poet, drawing all his literary genius from his own imagination and sensory resources. Biographers and critics have agreed that his sister, Dorothy, played a major role in his poetic achievements. The success of this great literary figure tells the story of a younger sister who consecrated her entire life to the greatest good of her brother, sacrificing for herself everything outside him and his existence.”
Available on the Web.
Dorothy Wordsworth 