Wordsworth, Mary. The Letters of Mary Wordsworth 1800–1855. Ed. Mary E. Burton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.
See index.
Copy: Internet Archive.
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.
Stillinger — Multiple Authorship (1991)
Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
For references to Dorothy Wordsworth, see index.
Kovacik — Dorothy Wordsworth (1985)
Kovacik, Karen. “Dorothy Wordsworth.” College English 47.4 (April 1985): 374–75.
Poem about Dorothy on her brother’s wedding day.
Coe — Wordsworth and the Literature of Travel (1953)
Coe, Charles Norton. Wordsworth and the Literature of Travel. New York: Bookman Associates, 1953.
Scattered references to Dorothy Wordsworth; see pp. 19, 29–32, 47–48, 82–83.
Digital copy: Internet Archive.
Leask — Stepping Westward (2020)
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.
Duffin — Dorothy Wordsworth (1955)
Duffin, H. C. “Dorothy Wordsworth.” Contemporary Review 187 (January 1955): 47–51.
“Even apart from its pitiful ending, Dorothy Wordsworth’s life was a tragedy. No one can blame Wordsworth for marrying, but his marriage to Mary Hutchinson was a betrayal of Dorothy, and the ruin it made of her life was reflected in his poetry. The sight of the gradual death, in Dorothy, of the brilliant happiness that had been hers, and his, before 1802, poisoned his own happiness, and hence the springs of poetry in him” (p. 50).
Web: Internet Archive.
Veevers — Jane and Dorothy (2018)
Veevers, Marian. Jane and Dorothy: A True Tale of Sense and Sensibility: The Lives of Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth. New York: Pegasus Books, 2018.
Contents: Prologue: The inward secrets of our hearts — Part 1: Gentlemen’s daughters, Little prattlers among men, Original sin, Fashionably educated and left without a fortune — Part 2: Love and friendship, Ladies of the rectory, A happy command of language, Considering the future, Falling in love, Betrayal, Journeys, brothers, freedom and confinement, A house of my own — Part 3: An experiment in liberty, My own darling child, A small revolution, Poetry and prose, A maid whom there were none to praise, Homecoming and exile, Exercised to constraint — Our affections do rebel, Very capable of loving, Marriage: The settlement we should aim at — Part 4: Writing and publication: My father cannot provide for us, Another exile, another homecoming — Part 5: Beyond 1809 — Epilogue: A natural sequel to an unnatural beginning? — Appendix 1: Stanzas from The Minstrel — Appendix 2: The Forest-Epode — Appendix 3: Among All the Lovely Things My Love Had Been.
Review: Frances Wilson, “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 2017.
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.
De Quincey — De Quincey to Wordsworth (1963)
Jordan, John E. De Quincey to Wordsworth: A Biography of a Relationship. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; London: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Includes letters from De Quincey to the Wordsworth family. Very extensive references to Dorothy Wordsworth; see index.
Review: W. J. B. Owen, Modern Language Review 58.2 (April 1963): 247–48.
Dorothy Wordsworth 