User:Rae (BYU)/dorothy wordsworth

User:Rae (BYU)/Life timeline

Grasmere

 * for Cervelli, dw's empathetic journals stem from spontaneous emotional overflow, specifically that cord between love of nature and love of people which he sees as her sharing with William... [feminist approach] journals now seen as embodying a characteristically female dialectic... serve as a reminder of what William valued in her... begins when she fears the loss of her brother after his marriage to Mary...(pp.39-41 authorship)


 * London Quarterly Review p.112: "She was a poet by nature, though she wrote her poetry in prose." ; "Her words are scenes, and something more"


 * Nature of DW influence on WW- "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, / And humble cares, and delicate fears, / A heart, the fountain of sweet tears, / And love, and thought and joy."

Ullswater

 * account of a November journey in the Lake District, first of four shorter journals...begin on Nov 7 of economically vivid evocation of dreariness and light...may be aptly described as a study in light and shade, in clarity and mist (contrasts)...challenge of the excursion had been to unify, through images and overall mood-music, what had been in fact a crowded and diverse set of human encounters (pp=140-145 authorship)

Scawfell

 * challenge is opposite of Ullswater - to diversify and contextualize what might overwise be a single-minded narrative of the ascent and descent of England's highest mountain (as 145-149)

Second tour

 * divided aims: 1. addressing the issue of how to revisit and review scenes first recounted in the Recollections nineteen years before 2. recounting a journey significant only in its own terms and increasingly preoccupied with the fears and the illness of her companion Joanna Hutchinson...result in DW nursing her friend for five weeks in Edinburgh (as p.149-151)

Isle of Man

 * DW's last journal of travel of her visit to her 1822 companion Joanna Hutchinson in the Isle of Man during 1828... (as p 160-162)

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, rumors 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