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 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 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...
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 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 Caroline Bowles
A few months after publication, The Birth-Day was read with very much pleasure by the William WordsworthWordsworth clan.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia. Caroline Bowles Southey, 1786-1854. Ashgate, 1998.
122
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford discussed it in an exchange of letters. While Mitford thought...
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 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, 1957–1965, 2 vols.
2: 195-6, 195n4
Burton, Sarah. A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb. Viking, 2003.
263
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, 1957–1965, 2 vols.
2: 189
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
Friends, Associates Sara Coleridge
Her playmates included Edith Southey and Dora Wordsworth .
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, and Sara Coleridge. Sara Coleridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays. Yale University Press, 1989.
25
William Wordsworth 's poem The Triad describes these three young girls.
Commire, Anne, and Deborah Klezmer, editors. Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Yorkin Publications, 1999–2002, 17 vols.
Friends, Associates Mary Lamb
ML 's friends (many of them made through Charles) included Eliza Fenwick (whose husband and Charles drank together), Henry Crabb Robinson , and many more canonical members of the Romantic movement. Charles was close to...
Friends, Associates Sara Coleridge
Among women writers, in addition to Dorothy Wordsworth , Joanna Baillie , and Maria Jane Jewsbury , SC also knew Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Anna Jameson , Elizabeth Rigby , Elizabeth Gaskell , and Harriet Martineau
Friends, Associates Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A Christian and political radical, STC associated with William Godwin and Robert Southey . William Wordsworth wrote of him on 21 March 1796, I saw but little of him. I wished indeed to have seen...

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