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
.
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, 1986.
xii
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, 1942.
The last entry is a moving tribute to the recently deceased Virginia Woolf
Textual Features
Mary Lamb
She went on here to offer the consolation that this is a defect I trust time will remedy.
Lamb, Charles, 1775 - 1834, and Mary, 1764 - 1847 Lamb. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb. Editor Marrs, Edwin J., Jr, Cornell University Press, 1975, 3 vols.
2: 63
She liked to write what she described (to Dorothy Wordsworth
) as a long gossipping...
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 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.
qtd. in
Godden, Rumer. A House with Four Rooms. Macmillan, 1989.
162
Textual Production
Eliza Fenwick
Dorothy Wordsworth
had contributed two little poems of her own composition
qtd. in
Grundy, Isobel, and Eliza Fenwick. “Introduction and Appendices”. Secresy, 2nd ed., Broadview, 1998, 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...
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...
Travel
Maria Jane Jewsbury
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, 1 Mar.–31 May 1984, pp. 177-03.
182
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, 1989.
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...
