Dorothy Wordsworth

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Standard Name: Wordsworth, Dorothy
Birth Name: Dorothy Wordsworth
DW is chiefly remembered for her Romantic-period journals, especially for her descriptions of the detail of nature, landscape, growth, and seasonal change. The journals, however, are equally remarkable for observing the doings of people: both the precise circumstances and the personal pleasures of the rural poor and vagrants. DW was also a travel writer, and interest has been growing in her thirty or so very interesting poems extant. Besides writing these poems, she exerted profound if unquantifiable influence on the poetry of her brother William .
Image of Dorothy Wordsworth from a painting by S. Crosthwaite, 1833, at Rydal Mount, Cumbria (home of herself and her brother's family during all of her later life). All that can be clearly seen of her clothing is a cap with ruffled edges and a large bow, and a scarf or shawl. She looks directly at the viewer. The lower part of the portrait, not visible here, shows spectacles and an open manuscript book on her lap and a little white dog at her feet.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Anne Ridler
Anne Bradby (later AR ) was still at school when she first met Charles Williams , the poet, Christian apologist, novelist, playwright and essayist, who was a friend of her headmistress, and came to lecture...
Literary responses Mary Robinson
The title and publisher convinced Dorothy Wordsworth that MR was cashing in on the fame of her brother 's Lyrical Ballads; she told a friend that he was thinking of changing his own title...
Textual Features Edith Sitwell
Sitwell chose two women from before and five from during the eighteenth century, ten from the nineteenth century, and two from her own.
Sitwell, Edith. English Women. William Collins.
The last entry is a moving tribute to the recently deceased Virginia Woolf
Textual Production Muriel Spark
Spark's first Brontë project was a group biography of the whole family, including the parents. In June 1949 she felt like a pregnant tigress with this work. It was to be published by Lindsay Drummond
Textual Features Alison Uttley
Her diaries offer an apparently uncensored version of what she toned down in her autobiographical works: an internal world of great passion, where self-confidence and uncertainty, pride and self-pity, joy and anguish are intermingled.
Judd, Denis. Alison Uttley. Michael Joseph.
xii
Friends, Associates Helen Maria Williams
On her return to Paris after Robespierre's death, HMW and Stone lived in a house (where she held her salon) on the Quai Malaquais. After peace was announced between England and France in 1801...
Family and Intimate relationships William Wordsworth
William was very close to his sister, Dorothy . They were separated in childhood following their mother's death, but reunited in 1794 to spend the rest of their lives together. Dorothy was immeasurably important to...
Health William Wordsworth
Compelled to return from France by lack of funds, he seems to have undergone some kind of emotional breakdown whose repercussions lasted more than a year, and from which he later felt his sister Dorothy
Wealth and Poverty William Wordsworth
A substantial legacy of nine hundred pounds from his friend Raisley Calvert , who died of consumption (tuberculosis) on 9 or 10 January 1795, changed the course of WW 's life, and also that of...
Family and Intimate relationships William Wordsworth
Throughout his marriage and his career WW shared his home with his sister Dorothy .

Timeline

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Texts

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