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Dorothy Wordsworth
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Main page For the poet, daughter of William Wordsworth, see Dora Wordsworth.
Contents Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth (25 December 1771 – 25
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January 1855) was an English author, poet and diarist.
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She was the sister of the Romantic poet William
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Donate to Wikipedia Wordsworth, and the two were close all their lives.
Wikipedia store Wordsworth had no ambitions to be an author, and her
writings consist only of series of letters, diary entries,
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poems and short stories.
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1 Life
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2 Notes
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3 Bibliography Drawing of Dorothy Wordsworth in
4 External links middle age
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She was born on Christmas Day in Cockermouth, Cumberland in 1771. Despite the early death of
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 She was born on Christmas Day in Cockermouth, Cumberland in 1771. Despite the early death of
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her mother, Dorothy, William and their three step-brothers had a happy childhood. When in 1783,
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their father died and the children were sent to live with various relatives, Wordsworth was sent
Cite this page alone to live with her aunt, Elizabeth Threlkeld, in Halifax, West Yorkshire.[1] After she was able to
be reunited with William, firstly at Racedown Lodge in Dorset in 1795 and afterwards (1797/98) at
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Alfoxden House in Somerset, they became inseparable companions. The pair lived in poverty at
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first, and would often beg for cast-off clothes from their friends.[2]
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Printable version William wrote of her in his famous Tintern Abbey poem:

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Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
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Wikisource The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
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Of thy wild eyes [...]
Cymraeg
My dear, dear Sister!
Deutsch
Español Wordsworth was a diarist and somewhat amateur poet with little interest in becoming an
Italiano established writer. "I should detest the idea of setting myself up as an author," she once wrote,
Nederlands "give Wm. the Pleasure of it."[3] She almost published her travel account with William to Scotland in
नेपाल
1803 Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, but a publisher was not found[4] and it would not
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be published until 1874.
Svenska
Edit links She wrote a very early account of an ascent of Scafell Pike in 1818 (perhaps predated only by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's of 1802), 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 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[5] (in its fourth
edition by 1876), but with attribution, if only to William Wordsworth. Consequently, this story was
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 very widely read by the many visitors to the Lake District over more than half of the 19th century.[6]

She never married, and after William married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, 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".[2]

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, a close friend who
popularised the fairytale Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Dorothy'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,[7] and
several other journals and collections of her letters have since been published.

The Grasmere Journal and Wordsworth'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. For example;

I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about
them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the
rest tossed & reeled & danced & 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[8][9]

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 This passage is clearly brought to mind when reading William's 'Daffodils', where her brother, in
this poem of two years later, describes what appears to be the shared experience in the journal as
his own solitary observation. Her observations and descriptions have been considered to be as
poetic if not more so than that of her brother.[10] In her time she was described as being one of the
few poets who have lived who could have provided so vivid and picturesque a scene.[11]

Notes [edit]
1. ^ MacLean, 7
2. ^ a b
Cavendish, Richard. "Death of Dorothy Wordsworth: January 25th, 1855". History Today, Vol.
55, January 2005.
3. ^ De Selincourt, Ernest (ed.). "The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 2". Oxford,
England: Clarendon Press, 1967. 454
4. ^ De Selincourt, vii
5. ^ Summit of Scawfell, pp. 158–159
6. ^ Dorothy Wordsworth's ascent of Scafell Pike, 1818
7. ^ Polowetzky, Michael. "Prominent Sisters: Mary Lamb, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Sarah Disraeli".
Westport CT: Greenwood, 1996. 66
8. ^ Dorothy's Journal. Wordsworth Trust
9. ^ Wordsworth 1802.
10. ^ Ellacombe 1884, Daffofils p. 76 .
11. ^ LQR 1853, Memoirs of Wordsworth, Issue 183, January, p. 112 .

Bibliography [edit]

De Selincourt, Ernest. Dorothy Wordsworth: A Biography. The Clarendon Press, 1933.

Gittings, Robert & Manton, Jo. Dorothy Wordsworth. Clarendon Press, 1985. ISBN 0-19-818519-7

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 Jones, Kathleen. A Passionate Sisterhood: Wives, Sisters and Daughters of the Lakeland Poets.
Virago Press ISBN 1-86049-492-7
Levin, Susan M. Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. McFarland and Co., 2009. ISBN 978-0-7864-
4164-8
Macdonald MacLean, Catherine. Dorothy Wordsworth, the Early Years. New York: The Viking Press,
1932.
Wilson, Frances. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life. Faber and Faber, 2009.
Wordsworth, Dorothy (1802). "Excerpt from Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, 15 April 1802" .
Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth: The Alfoxden Journal 1798, The Grasmere Journals 1800-1803, ed.
Mary Moorman. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. pp. 109–110. Retrieved 22 December 2014.
Ellacombe, Henry Nicholson (1884). The Plant-lore & Garden-craft of Shakespeare (2 ed.). London:
W Satchell and Co. Retrieved 26 November 2014.
"The London Quarterly Review" (January - April) . 92 (183-186). 1853. Retrieved 24 December 2014.

External links [edit]

Petri Liukkonen. "Dorothy Wordsworth" . Books and Wikisource has original

Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Archived from the original on works written by or about:
Dorothy Wordsworth
4 July 2013.
Works by Dorothy Wordsworth at Project Gutenberg Wikiquote has quotations
Works by or about Dorothy Wordsworth at Internet related to: Dorothy
Wordsworth
Archive

V· T · E · William Wordsworth
Topics Early life · Lake Poets ·
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads · "Anecdote for Fathers" · "The Idiot Boy" · "Lucy Gray" ·
The Lucy poems ("She dwelt among the untrodden ways" · "A slumber did my spirit seal" ·

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 Lyrical Ballads "Strange fits of passion have I known" · "Three years she grew in sun and shower") ·
The Matthew poems · "Michael, a Pastoral" · "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" ·
"We Are Seven" ·
Poems, in Two Volumes · Peter Bell · The White Doe of Rylstone ·
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge" · "Elegiac Stanzas" · "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
Later poetry · The Lucy poems ("I travelled among unknown men") · "London, 1802" ·
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality" · "Resolution and Independence" · "The Solitary Reaper" ·
"The World Is Too Much with Us" · "Character of the Happy Warrior" ·
The Recluse The Excursion · The Prelude ·

Prose Guide to the Lakes ·

Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Robert Southey · Dora Wordsworth (daughter) ·
People
Dorothy Wordsworth (sister) ·

WorldCat Identities · VIAF: 19695644 · LCCN: n80025953 ·

Authority control ISNI: 0000 0001 2123 0153 · GND: 118807897 · SUDOC: 028625870 ·
BNF: cb12042328z (data) · MusicBrainz: 96f6c7d5-7f57-4659-a54e-76b1e46475fd ·

Categories: 1771 births 1855 deaths People from Cockermouth English diarists
English women poets Women diarists William Wordsworth Wordsworth family
19th-century women writers 18th-century women writers

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