Tag: William Wordsworth

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Fennimore — Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect (2024)

Fennimore, Eve Dixon. “‘Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Revisiting’ on the 1820 Continental Tour.” Criterion 17.1 (Winter, 2024): 89–103.

Abstract: “This paper argues that Dorothy Wordsworth, in her often overlooked Journal of a Tour on the Continent, was essentially ‘revisiting’ places that she was viewing for the first time, as she had visited them secondhand through William’s stories and writings about them. In 1820, Dorothy, William, and Mary Wordsworth embarked on a tour of the continent in the inverse direction of William’s youthful 1790 trip. For thirty years, Dorothy had heard stories and read about his experiences, building up an image in her mind of what the Continent would be like which changed her own exploration of the sights. By exploring Dorothy’s tour as a form of revisiting, we see how imagining a place before physically seeing it shapes the viewing experience, blurring the line between reality and imagination. Further, a close study of Dorothy’s journal illustrates the impermanence of sites and travelers as they inevitably change over time.”

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Walker — Dorothy Wordsworth (1988)

Walker, Eric. C. “Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, and the Kirkstone Pass.” Wordsworth Circle 19.3 (June 1988): 116–21.

“I offer these various Kirkstone texts as an example of a generally overlooked connection between the two writers, and I want to suggest that it is still useful to study William’s texts that are subsequent to and dependent upon Dorothy’s texts, not to assemble wrongheaded evidence of the better writer Dorothy Wordsworth could not be, but simply to begin to assemble in a systematic way the evidence of how Dorothy Wordsworth’s prose has been read” (p. 116).

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 Some Letters of the Wordsworth Family, Now First Published with a Few Unpublished Letters of Coleridge and Southey and Others.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.

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Bennett — William Wordsworth in Context (2015)

Bennett, Andrew, ed. William Wordsworth in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

See Chap. 3, “Dorothy Wordsworth,” by Judith W. Page, pp. 19–26. “The Grasmere journal gives us a window into William’s life and work, but a view that is controlled by Dorothy and often complicates or contradicts the self-presentation in the poems and prefaces” (p. 20).

Slightly incomplete PDF of the chapter: Google Books.

Copy: Library of Congress.