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
.
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...
The direction of WH
's life was shaped by his early meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, and through him with William
and Dorothy Wordsworth
.
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...
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
Friends, Associates
Maria Jane Jewsbury
During MJJ
's visit to Rydal Mount, she rode ponies through the nearby mountains while listening to Wordsworth
recite poetry. Sometimes during these excursions, she received freshly picked nosegays from the celebrated poet. Later...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...