Tag: women

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Easley — Wandering Women (1996)

Easley, Alexis. “Wandering Women: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals and the Discourse on Female Vagrancy.” Women’s Writing 3.1 (1996), 63–77.

Abstract: “This essay provides a historical context for Dorothy Wordsworth’s depictions of vagrant women in the Grasmere Journals. The first part of the essay examines the ways in which the discourses on vagrancy intersected with the discourses on gender during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second part of the essay examines how images of women in social and economic discourses are reflected in Dorothy Wordsworth’s depictions of female vagrants in the Grasmere Journals. Though on the surface, Wordsworth seems to be non‐judgemental and sympathetic in her depictions of the poor, a closer reading reveals that these representations are not as ideologically “innocent” as they first appear. Though Dorothy Wordsworth was in many ways isolated from society, her representations of the poor still existed in a complex intertextual relationship with the social and political discourses of her day.”
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Shammari — Recasting Dorothy Wordsworth (2019)

Shammari, Shahd Daham al-. “Recasting Dorothy Wordsworth: A Woman Writer’s Undiscovered Literary Voice.” Arab Journal for the Humanities 37 (Spring, 2019): 291–303.

Abstract: “Women writers are often neglected in the literary canon. More often than not, critically acclaimed Romantic writers were male. The most famous Romantic poet, known for his poetic genius is William Wordsworth. Not much scholarly attention has been given to his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, who wrote extensively but not publicly. This paper sheds light on Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals as worthy of further literary recognition. Many literary critics and scholars have underestimated the value of her writing as not poetic enough, but in her rigorous documentation of everyday life, readers are able to gain insight into the harsh effects of patriarchy on women writers. Unlike her brother, Dorothy’s sense of self was not egotistical and instead hesitant and unsure. This paper uncovers Dorothy’s divided sense of self as evident in her writings and claims that her literary genius has gone unnoticed and could be considered as experimental and life writing.”
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Boden — Matrilineal Journalism (1998)

Boden, Helen. “Matrilineal Journalism: Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental Tours and the Female Sublime.” Women’s Writing 5.3 (1998): 329–352.

“This article introduces Mary Wordsworth as a travel writer, and contributes to the growing debate about the ‘female sublime’ by suggesting how the sublime is used, in slightly different ways, by Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth to interrogate the nature of writing and representation.”

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Crisafulli — Romantic Women Poets (2007)

Crisafulli, Lilla Maria, and Cecelia Pietropoli, eds. Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender. New York: Rodop, 2007.

See Crisafulli, “Within or Without? Problems of Perspective in Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Dorothy Wordsworth,” pp. 35–62.

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Wilson — Dorothy Wordsworth and Her Female Contemporaries’ Legacy (2019)

Wilson, Louise Ann. “Dorothy Wordsworth and her Female Contemporaries’ Legacy.” Performance Research 24.2 (2119): 109–19.

Abstract: “In this article I argue that a feminine ‘material’ sublime approach to mountains exists and has for generations but remains under-recognized and on the fringes of mainstream dialogues, which – historically and in the present – are dominated by masculine ‘transcendent’ sublime accounts, encounters and endeavours. The article enables me to explore how in Early Romanticism the concept of the masculine ‘transcendent’ sublime – an intellectual and spiritual experience that transcends physical matter – came to dominate discourses on landscape. I then propose how, in contrast, the feminine ‘material’ sublime is located in and present to the physical landscape, not as a place from which to ‘escape’ or ‘disappear’ but as a place in which to ‘reappear’ – a process I suggest is transformative and therapeutic. To do this, I show how the landscape writing of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries represents a feminine ‘material’ sublime ‘mode’ of engaging with landscape that enabled them to see afresh ‘everyday’ objects, people and experiences that were ordinarily overlooked or on the edges of mainstream social and cultural discourses.I explore the way in which the work of these women and their ‘mode’ of engagement are closely allied with my own practice and have informed a model I have developed for creating applied scenography in the form of walking-performances in mountainous and rural landscapes that emplace, re-image and transform ‘missing’, marginal and challenging life-events. Underpinning that model are seven ‘scenographic’ principles, which I demonstrate through an analysis of a number of walking-performance projects. The Gathering / Yr Helfa (2014), which revealed the fertility cycles of the ewes on a hill-farm in Wales, and two projects specific to The Lake District: Warnscale: A Land Mark Walk Reflecting On Infertility and Childlessness (2015-ongoing) aimed at women who are biologically childless-by-circumstance (2015); Dorothy’s Room and Women’s Walks to Remember: ‘With memory I was there.’ (2018), an installation and surrogate-walking project that maps walks women are no longer able to do physically but remember vividly.”
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Andrews — Wanderers (2021)

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.

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Corkran — Romance of Woman’s Influence (1906)

Corkran, Alice. The Romance of Woman’s Influence: St. Monica, Vittoria Colonna, Madame Guyon, Caroline Herschel, Mary Unwin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Other Mothers, Wives, Sisters, and Friends who Have Helped Great Men. London: Blackie and Sons, 1906.

See pp. 185–214. “To speak of Dorothy Wordsworth is to speak of a poet in prose as remarkable as William Wordsworth was a poet in verse. But it is not of Dorothy, the writer of the journal, from which many a painter might paint scenes of surpassing beauty, from which many a poet might have derived inspiration,—it is not so much of this Dorothy that I shall speak, as of Dorothy, the sister, the inspirer of her brother, his friend and companion” ( p. 185).

Digital copy: Google Books.

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Bohls — Women Travel Writers (1995)

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.”

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Benstock — Private Self (1988)

Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

See J. H. McGavran, Jr., “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals – Putting Herself Down,” pp. 230–53.