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
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
Publishing Carol Ann Duffy
Similar tiny, mostly square, hard-cover books followed for later Christmases: Mrs Scrooge, 2009, illustrated by Posy Simmonds ; The Christmas Truce, 2011, illustrated by David Roberts (which had first appeared in The Guardian...
Reception Carol Ann Duffy
Looking back at her first year as Laureate (a privilege and a joy) CAD recalled particularly readings in aid of disaster relief after the earthquake in Haiti, when poetry audiences of more...
Residence Rumer Godden
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...
Residence Dora Carrington
Carrington loved and was creatively inspired by their new home. She compared it to Dorothy and William Wordsworth 's Lake District arrangements.
Gerzina, Gretchen. Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington, 1893-1932. John Murray, 1989.
161
Textual Features Patricia Beer
It incorporated fifty new poems written since her collected volume. Among them, miscellaneous pieces succeed to a sequence of twelve sonnets entitled Wessex Calendar and a set of modern imagist verses entitled Observations. The...

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