User:Rae (BYU)/dorothy wordsworth

User:Rae (BYU)/Life timeline

Early life

Dorothy Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland on December 25, 1771. She was the sister of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and the third of five children born to Ann Cookson and John Wordsworth. Following the death of her mother in 1778, Dorothy was sent alone to live with her second cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, in Halifax, West Yorkshire until 1787. During this period, Dorothy attended boarding school at Hipperholme and later transferred to a day-school in Halifax. In 1787, Dorothy moves to her grandparent's house in Penrith, where she renews contact with her brothers after nine years living apart. She later moves to Forncett with her newly married uncle, William Cookson, and his wife. Dorothy was reunited with her brother William in 1794 after a three year separation, and the pair stayed for two months at Old Windebrowe cottage. Dorothy and William later settled at Racedown Lodge in Dorset, where they briefly fostered a three-year-old boy named Basil Montagu, until 1797.

In July of 1798, Dorothy and William walk through Wye Valley, inspiring William's famous poem "Tintern Abbey", in which he wrote of Dorothy:

Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes ...
My dear, dear Sister!

— William Wordsworth, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"

Writing

Dorothy Wordsworth was primarily a diarist. In 1797, Dorothy and her brother William met with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and move to live near him at Alfoxton House, Somerset. From January to May of 1798, Dorothy keeps her Alfoxden Journal, for which the manuscript is now lost.

• Grasmere Journal

According to Dorothy, her account of traveling in Scotland with William and Coleridge in 1803, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, was written for "the sake of a few friends, who, it seemed, ought to have been with us".

Writing

She wrote a very early account of an ascent of Scafell Pike in 1818, climbing the mountain in the company of her friend Mary Barker, Miss Barker's maid, and two local people to act as guide and porter. Dorothy's work was used in 1822 (and later in 1823 and 1835) by her brother William, unattributed, in his popular guide book to the Lake District – and this was then copied by Harriet Martineau in her equally successful guide(MARTINEAU 158–159) (in its fourth edition by 1876), but with attribution, if only to William Wordsworth. The account was quoted in other guidebooks as well. Consequently, this story was very widely read by the many visitors to the Lake District over more than half of the 19th century.(SW ON SCAFELL, INTRO TO SCAWFELL)

She never married, and after William married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, she continued to live with them. She was by now 31 and thought of herself as too old for marriage. In 1829 she fell seriously ill and was to remain an invalid for the remainder of her life. She died at eighty-three in 1855 near Ambleside, having spent the past twenty years in, according to the biographer Richard Cavendish, "a deepening haze of senility".(DEATH OF DW)

Her Grasmere Journal was published in 1897, edited by William Angus Knight. The journal eloquently described her day-to-day life in the Lake District, long walks she and her brother took through the countryside, and detailed portraits of literary lights of the early 19th century, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb and Robert Southey.

The Grasmere Journal and Dorothy's other works revealed how vital she was to her brother's success. William relied on her detailed accounts of nature scenes and borrowed freely from her journals. He drew inspiration from Dorothy's journal entry of the sibling's encounter with a field of daffodils:

I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.

— Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal (15 April 1802)

In his poem, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," William describes what appears to be the shared experience in the journal as his own solitary observation. Dorothy's observations and descriptions have been considered to be as poetic if not more so than those of her brother. In her time she was described as being one of the few writers who could have provided so vivid and picturesque a scene.

• London Quarterly Review p.112: "She was a poet by nature, though she wrote her poetry in prose." ; her journals supplied WW with many of his materials; Daffodils: paraphrase of her journal, "so simple and original, so vivid and picturesque"; "Her words are scenes, and something more"

Critical reception

Dorothy Wordsworth's works came to light just as literary critics were beginning to re-examine women's role in literature. The success of the Grasmere Journal led to a renewed interest in Wordsworth,(POLO 66) and several other journals and collections of her letters have since been published. Scholar Anne Mellor has identified Dorothy as demonstrating a 'model of affiliation rather than a model of individual achievement',(MELLOR 186) more commonly associated with Romanticism.(GILBERT 32–33)

Life

• Death of DW: buried in churchyard in England at Grasmere in the Lake District with William, William's wife, and other family, remembered for diaries not published until years after her death, started first journal in 1798, friendship with Coleridge and created Lyrical Ballads, end of 1799 Dove Cottage in Grasmere, year younger than William, parents died when children and she and William were close, lived in poverty, "cast-off clothes", "unconventional person" who took long walks in the country, never married, remained member of household when William married in 1802 (age 31), decided too old for marriage, rumours of incest with William baseless but close relationship, didn't attend William's wedding and eventually stopped keeping her diary, 1813 Wordsworths moved to Rydal Mount, D fell ill in 1829 and was an "invalid", age 60s-84 (death) "deepening haze of senility", William looked after Dorothy during his last years until his death in 1850, D journals first published in 1897.
• Grasmere journals: no job outside of house, no strict routine, journal conveys the "unpremeditated rhythms" of her and William's lives (p1), Tintern Abbey: "Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,/My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch/The language of my former heart, and read/My former pleasures in the shooting lights/Of thy wild eyes, Oh! yet a little while/May I behold in thee what I was once" (xiii), journal reflects moments of "overwhelming feeling", not writing for strangers but Wordsworth only (xv), private diary, daily life of a poet (WW) from his sister's pov and without focus on him, details of daffodils for WW, "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears", "Dorothy's way of seeing, when she purposively set out to produce a 'character', was to capture first of all the detail of appearance" (xvi), [interpretation of her goal w writing xvii], many revisions of the journal, dorothy's care was for william and the stress writing poems gave him, looked after WW, journal contents: (settling of house and garden, composition of poetry, WW marriage and the return), ends in early 1803 with completion of notebook

Citations

• Atkin, Polly (2022). Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth. Saraband. LCCN 2021389292.
• Levin, Susan M. (1987). Dorothy Wordsworth & Romanticism. New Brunswick: Rutgers, The State University. ISBN 0-813-51146-1.
• Matlak, Richard E. (1997). The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797–1800. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10166-X.
• Newlyn, Lucy (2013). William and Dorothy Wordsworth: 'All in Each Other'. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-969639-0.
• Ellis, Amanda M. (1967). Rebels and Conservatives: Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Their Circle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Homans, Margaret (1980). Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-69-106440-6.
• Alexander, Meena (1989). Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley. Barnes & Noble Books. ISBN 0-389-20884-1.
• Healey, Nicola (2012). Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-27772-4.
• Wordsworth, Dorothy (1991). Trickett, Rachel (ed.). Dorothy Wordsworth's Illustrated Lakeland Journals. London: Diamond Books. ISBN 0-583-31288-8.
• Wordsworth, Dorothy (1897). Knight, William A. (ed.). Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. London, New York: Macmillan Co. ISBN 0-192-81103-7.
• Maclean, Catherine Macdonald (1972). Dorothy and William Wordsworth. New York: Octagon Books. ISBN 0-374-95250-7.
• Wordsworth, Dorothy (1987). Clark, Hilary (ed.). The Greens of Grasmere. Wolverhampton: Clark and Howard Books. ISBN 0-950-95553-1.
• Wordsworth, Dorothy (1970). Eigerman, Hyman (ed.). The Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ABC-CLIO, LLC. ISBN 0-837-13436-6.
• Wordsworth, Dorothy (1985). Hill, Alan G. (ed.). Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Selection. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-198-18539-1.
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Bibliography

• De Selincourt, Ernest (1933). Dorothy Wordsworth: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OCLC 571781758.
• Smith, Ken Edward (2011). Dorothy Wordsworth and the Profession of Authorship: A Critical Commentary on Her Letters, Journals, Life Writing, and Poetry. The Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-1533-1.
• Woof, Pamela (1988). Dorothy Wordsworth, Writer. Grasmere, Cumbria: The Wordsworth Trust. ISBN 978-0-95-106166-4.

External links

• Petri Liukkonen. "Dorothy Wordsworth". Books and Writers.
• Works by Dorothy Wordsworth at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Dorothy Wordsworth at the Internet Archive