Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Dorothy Wordsworth
-
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
.
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...
Travel
Sara Coleridge
In her years growing up, SC
frequently visited the William WordsworthWordsworth
family at Rydal Mount.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, and Sara Coleridge. Sara Coleridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays. Yale University Press.
MJJ
called on theWordsworth
family at Rydal Mount for the first time.
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “The Hidden Rill: The Life and Career of Maria Jane Jewsbury, I”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
66
, No. 2, The Library, pp. 177-03.
182
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
U. A. Fanthorpe
This volume includes poems about women, and writers, and love, treated in varying tones. Three Women Wordsworths does not privilege Dorothy
as a writer, but considers each invisible life. Another piece sets the record straight...
Textual Production
Eliza Fenwick
Dorothy Wordsworth
had contributed two little poems of her own composition
Grundy, Isobel, and Eliza Fenwick. “Introduction and Appendices”. Secresy, 2ndnd ed, Broadview, pp. 7 - 34, 361.
13
for an anthology by EF
. This was Songs for the Nursery, collected from the works of the most renowned poets, published...
Textual Production
Rumer Godden
RG
based a children's story, The Mousewife, on a passage from the journal of Dorothy Wordsworth
; she wrote it within fifty-five minutes, never revised, and called it vouchsafed.
Godden, Rumer. A House with Four Rooms. Macmillan.
162
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
Patricia Beer
It incorporated fifty new poems written since her collected volume. Among them, miscellaneous pieces succeed to a sequence of twelve sonnets entitled Wessex Calendar and a set of modern imagist verses entitled Observations. The...
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 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
Textual Features
Mary Lamb
She went on here to offer the consolation that this is a defect I trust time will remedy.
Lamb, Charles, and Mary Lamb. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb. Editor Marrs, Edwin J., Cornell University Press.
2: 63
She liked to write what she described (to Dorothy Wordsworth
) as a long gossipping...
Residence
Rumer Godden
It was an inaccessible spot of great beauty with no shops, doctor, or European company. The bungalow was an island among the tea-plantations, with views of the high Himalayas in the Sikkim, and the...
Residence
Dora Carrington
Carrington loved and was creatively inspired by their new home. She compared it to Dorothy
and William Wordsworth
's Lake District arrangements.
Gerzina, Gretchen. Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington, 1893-1932. John Murray.
161
Reception
Carol Ann Duffy
Looking back at her first year as Laureate (a privilege and a joy) CAD
recalled particularly readings in aid of disaster relief after the earthquake in Haiti, when poetry audiences of more...
Publishing
Carol Ann Duffy
Similar tiny, mostly square, hard-cover books followed for later Christmases: Mrs Scrooge, 2009, illustrated by Posy Simmonds
; The Christmas Truce, 2011, illustrated by David Roberts
(which had first appeared in The Guardian...
Timeline
15 April 1802: Dorothy Wordsworth recorded in her diary...
Writing climate item
15 April 1802
Dorothy Wordsworth
recorded in her diary how she and her brother
, out walking, came on a mass of wild daffodils in bloom at the edge of a lake.
3 September 1802: William Wordsworth composed his well-known...
Writing climate item
3 September 1802
William Wordsworth
composed his well-known sonnetUpon Westminster Bridge, responding to the power of the city, as well as countryside or wilderness, to arouse transcendent feelings.
From April 1810: The Rev. Joseph Wilkinson's Select Views...
Writing climate item
From April 1810
The Rev. Joseph Wilkinson
's Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire appeared in instalments, containing William Wordsworth
's introductory Description of the Scenery of the English Lakes and later text.
10 September 2003: Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of...
Writing climate item
10 September 2003
Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of the Week a website entitled Poetry Landmarks of Britain: a map of poetic assocations plotted on an interactive map of Britain, searchable by region or category.
Texts
Wordsworth, Dorothy. George & Sarah Green. Editor Selincourt, Ernest De, Clarendon, 1936.
Wordsworth, Dorothy. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Editor Knight, William Angus, Macmillan, 1897.
Wordsworth, Dorothy. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Editor Selincourt, Ernest De, Macmillan, 1941.
Wordsworth, Dorothy, and William Wordsworth. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth: The Alfoxden Journal 1798; The Grasmere Journals 1800-1803. Editor Darbishire, Helen, Oxford University Press, 1958.
Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Helen Darbishire. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth: The Alfoxden Journal 1798; The Grasmere Journals 1800-1803. Editor Moorman, Mary, Oxford University Press, 1971.
Wordsworth, Dorothy. “Preface”. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by Ernest De Selincourt, Macmillan, 1941, p. 1: v - xix.
Wordsworth, Dorothy. Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland. Editor Shairp, John Campbell, Edmonston and Douglas, 1874.
Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journals. Editor Woof, Pamela, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Wordsworth, William et al. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Editors Selincourt, Ernest De et al., Clarendon, 1993.
Wordsworth, William, and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Later Years. Editor Selincourt, Ernest De, Clarendon Press, 1939.
