Bond, Alec. “Reconsidering Dorothy Wordsworth.” Charles Lamb Society Bulletin, July–October 1984, pp. 194–207.
Brownstein — Private Life (1973)
Brownstein, Rachel Mayer. “The Private Life: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals.” Modern Language Quarterly 34.1 (1973): 48–63.
“The Alfoxden-Grasmere journal contains a skeletal story of Dorothy’s and William’s perfect intimacy, his unexplained marriage and her wrenching loss, and finally the queer peace the three Wordsworths made together. . . . Nature stirs her to wonder and to words in an attempt to apprehend it before it dissolves into time; she watches it carefully for signs of the seam between reality and illusion, weighing fact and metaphor. Unambitious. she rarely organizes quantities of data, and for the most part fragment follows fragment. The journal form, unpretentious and dogged, loose but self-limiting, unfinished, with the smell of the private writing room forever about it, is admirably suited to what Dorothy Wordsworth had to say” (pp. 60–61, 63).
Copy on Web: PDF.
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.
Millar — Finding a Secure Place (2018)
Millar, Bonnie. “Finding a Secure Place” Nature, Domesticity, Movement and Attachment in the Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth.” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 43.1 (Spring, 2018): 63–78.
Gibson — Illness of Dorothy Wordsworth (1982)
Gibson, Iris I. J. M. “Illness of Dorothy Wordsworth.” British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Edition) 285 (18–25 December 1982): 1813–15.
“I regard her [migraine] attacks as multifactorial in origin, due to considerable physical and mental activity, to the stress of William’s problems and struggles with composition, and her undue anxiety about him” (p. 1813).
Beattie-Smith — Dorothy Wordsworth: Tours of Scotland (2019)
Beattie-Smith, Gillian. “Dorothy Wordsworth: Tours of Scotland, 1803 and 1822.” Northern Scotland 10.1 (May 2019): 20–40.
Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s name, writing, and identity as an author are frequently subsumed in the plural of ‘The Wordsworths’, in her relationship as the sister of the poet, William Wordsworth. But Dorothy was a Romantic author in her own right. She wrote poetry, narratives, and journals. Nine of her journals have been published. In 1803, and again in 1822, she toured Scotland and recorded her journeys in Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland and Journal of My Second Tour in Scotland. This article considers Dorothy’s two Scottish journals. It discusses them in the light of historical and literary contexts, and places of memorial.”
Dennis — Dorothy Wordsworth (1889)
Dennis, John. “Dorothy Wordsworth.” Leisure Hour, December 1889, pp. 121–25.
“The name of Dorothy Wordsworth is inseparably associated with that of her brother. What he owed to her self-denying affection, to her rare intellect, and to her profound love of Nature, the poet has acknowledged in words as familiar as they are beautiful. This ‘beloved sister,’ at the most critical period of Wordsworth’s early manhood, came to him with the ‘healing power’ which his noble verse has given so largely to others. . . . Her influence was abiding. She had herself a poet’s soul without his faculty of singing; and to her inspiring sympathy, expended without a thought of self, we are indebted for some of her brother’s finest poems” (p. 121).
Available on the Web.
Newlyn — Confluence (2011)
Newlyn, Lucy. “Confluence: William and Dorothy Wordsworth in 1798.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.2 (2011): 227–45.
Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal exemplifies the collaborative nature of creativity in the Wordsworth household. As a kind of commonplace book, it served to record shared experiences (often connected with conversations) which could be used as a future creative resource. But it was also an expression of Dorothy’s own unique way of seeing and responding to the natural world, which played a vital role in William’s intellectual development. This essay traces the influence of Dorothy’s prose style on William’s poetry during 1798, analysing the complex interactions between observation, conversation and recollection that took place in the compositional processes of both writers.”
Oakley — Evaluation of the Writings of Dorothy Wordsworth (1964)
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.
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 