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
Material Conditions of Writing Maria Jane Jewsbury
She completed Phantasmagoria while running the Jewsbury household in Manchester. A letter to Dorothy Wordsworth describes the conditions under which she wrote: most of the things in those two volumes were written in ill-health—Booksellers...
Literary responses Amelia Opie
The Critical Review, which had praised AO 's earlier work, thought this novel equally well done, and that the description of the heroine's death could stand comparison with those of Richardson 's Clarissa or...
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...
Literary responses Caroline Bowles
A few months after publication, The Birth-Day was read with very much pleasure by the William WordsworthWordsworth clan.
Blain, Virginia. Caroline Bowles Southey, 1786-1854. Ashgate.
122
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford discussed it in an exchange of letters. While Mitford thought...
Literary responses Seamus Heaney
Motion mentions the famous comparison of Heaney with Yeats , and observes that they shared a commitment to the matter of Ireland, but that Heaney eschews Yeats's cloudy symbols for an investment in the...
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
FH was slow to register on the radar of recuperative feminist critics. Cora Kaplan was an early exception in her anthology Salt and Bitter and Good, 1975.Margaret Homans in her early attempt to...
Literary responses Mary Lamb
Burton writes: The adoption and appropriation of Mary's ideas and expressions in his own work was a natural activity of Charles 's writing, but compared with the retrospective recognition of Dorothy Wordsworth 's contribution to...
Intertextuality and Influence Ruth Rendell
The novel contains particularly sophisticated subplots, including the intense rivalry between Burden's teenaged children, and Elizabeth's and Wexford's parallel fears of growing old. As usual in RR 's work, the novel gives an important role...
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
Health Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Dorothy Wordsworth wrote of STC : We have no hope of him. None that he will do anything more than he has already done.
Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: A Biography. Clarendon Press.
2: 189
Health Mary Lamb
One of Mary Lamb 's bouts of madness seems to have been brought on by agitation about the break between Coleridge and theWordsworths .
Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: A Biography. Clarendon Press.
2: 195-6, 195n4
Burton, Sarah. A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb. Viking.
263
Friends, Associates Eliza Fenwick
Other more or less radical friends of EF included Thomas Holcroft , Anne Plumptre , Elizabeth Benger , Jane Porter , Henry Crabb Robinson , Charles and Mary Lamb , and their friend Sarah Stoddart
Friends, Associates Dora Greenwell
Among DG 's other writer friends were Elizabeth Charles , Margaret Hunt , and Sarah Tytler .
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking.
297-8, 429
Bett, Henry. Dora Greenwell. Epworth Press.
18-20, 22
Gray, Janet. “Dora Greenwell’s Commonplace Book”. Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol.
57
, No. 1, pp. 47-74.
50, 51
Gray, Janet. “The Sewing Contest: Christina Rossetti and the Other Women”. A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, Vol.
8
, No. 2, pp. 233-57.
240
Hickok, Kathleen. Representations of Women: Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Poetry. Greenwood Press.
215
She was also acquainted with Longfellow , William Bell Scott
Friends, Associates William Hazlitt
The direction of WH 's life was shaped by his early meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge , and through him with William and Dorothy Wordsworth .
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...

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