Thesis.

This thesis deals with Dorothy Wordsworth's Rydal Journal, a journal written between 1824 and 1835, when Dorothy Wordsworth was between ages 53 and 64. The most interesting entries in the Rydal Journal include descriptions of William's political views, famous callers at Rydal Mount, church sermons Dorothy heard, books she was reading, and her relationships and correspondence with many friends and family members. In terms of structure, Dorothy's journal entries are generally quite similar over the eleven years of these volumes. Perhaps most strikingly, the vast majority begin with a record of the day's weather. Sometimes, she broadly outlines the entire day's weather (e.g., "Fine day—but still thundery" [11 July 1825]). Other times, she foregrounds the weather she woke up to or experienced in the morning (e.g., "Another fine morning—sun shines" [12 September 1826]). Regardless, throughout the entries, she intersperses events with the weather, as in this typical entry from 11 January 1827: "Very bright—Dora rides—Mrs. Arlow & 3 Norths call—I writ[in]g to Lady B. . . Lovely warm moonlight on snow—Long walk on Terrace." In this way, weather plays a central role in the Rydal Journal, for Dorothy employs weather as her primary measure of time. In what follows, I will begin by offering a short history of timekeeping before and during the Wordsworths' lifetimes, focusing particularly on the degree to which tracking and standardizing minutes and hours was becoming commonplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From there, I will show how, in contrast to this trend toward mechanical timekeeping, Dorothy processed time primarily through natural and climatological cycles and events during the Rydal Journal years. Dorothy's apparent rejection of clock time seems to be related to her reliance on nature, for weather time was much more lyrical than mechanical time.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, September 2009. / Restricted until 2nd September 2014.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s religious practices continued to evolve throughout her life. She was baptized Anglican, but after her mother’s death she resided with her mother’s cousin, where she practiced Unitarianism. When she later moved in with her uncle, she embraced evangelical Anglicanism. Records of her religious beliefs in her twenties are scarce, as after moving to Racedown with her brother William in 1795 and throughout her years living in Alfoxden, she rarely wrote of her involvement with organized religion. Only in the 1810s while at Grasmere did Dorothy Wordsworth begin to record a gradual return to church attendance. Concerning her religious practices in the years following this return, due to a relative lack of information concerning Dorothy Wordsworth’s spirituality during this period, scholars have concluded that her Anglicanism was unremarkable: groundbreaking biographer Ernest De Sélincourt called her faith a “simple orthodox piety” (267) while Robert Gittings and Jo Manton labeled it “the conventional piety of her middle age” (168). Often, scholars have also concluded that Dorothy Wordsworth’s Anglicanism was relatively orthodox, due to the outspoken High Churchmanship of her brothers William and Christopher. As this thesis demonstrates, however, Dorothy Wordsworth’s previously unpublished Rydal Journals complicate such conclusions. These journals offer a wealth of evidence concerning her religious practices and beliefs between 1825–35, including extensive lists of scripture references, records of her church attendance, logs of her religious reading, assessments of sermons, and expressions of her personal faith. The various findings suggest that Dorothy’s faith was more complex than previously understood, as it was passionate, informed, and, in ways, surprisingly evangelical.

The following study is interested in Dorothy Wordsworth's formation of her unique authorial identity and environmental ethos. I attend to her poetry and prose, specifically her journals written at Grasmere and her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1874) to demonstrate how she shaped her individual voice while navigating her occasionally conflicting roles of sister and writer. My project begins with a chapter providing a selective biographical and critical history of Dorothy Wordsworth and details how my work emerges from current trends in scholarship and continues an ongoing critical conversation about Dorothy Wordsworth's agency and originality. In my analysis of Dorothy's distinct poetic voice, I compare selections of her writing with William's to demonstrate how Dorothy expressed her perspectives regarding nature, community, and her place within her environment. In my chapter on Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, I analyze the ways in which Dorothy's narrative embraces the tenets of the picturesque while simultaneously acknowledging the tradition's limitations. Her environmental perspective was inherently rooted in domesticity; the idea of home and her community connections influenced how she engaged with and then recorded the environments she traveled to and the people she met. My project concludes by demonstrating how Dorothy Wordsworth's environmental ethos relates to the values promoted by modern environmental writers. Dorothy was intimately connected to her home and environment and modern environmental protection and conservation efforts encourage human connection to home and place. I consider how modern environmentalist movements could benefit from embodying the empathy that Dorothy showed for the natural world in their practices today. / Master of Arts / My thesis argues that while Dorothy Wordsworth was intrinsically involved in her brother William's poetic process, she actively created a unique writerly identity that can be detected throughout her journals and poems. My project begins with a chapter detailing how my work emerges from current trends in Dorothy Wordsworth scholarship, including feminist and ecocritical studies. In my analysis of Dorothy's individual poetic voice, I suggest that through her distinctive style and her mingling of poetry and prose, Dorothy was strongly asserting herself and her perspectives even when they conflicted with William's. Dorothy's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland exemplifies her unique environmental perspective, which was influenced by her community-centered identity; this contributes to what she chooses to recollect in her journal. My project concludes by demonstrating how Dorothy Wordsworth's environmental ethos relates to the values promoted by modern environmental writers. Dorothy was intimately connected to her home and environment and modern environmental protection and conservation efforts encourage human connection to home and place. I consider how modern environmentalist movements could benefit from embodying the empathy that Dorothy showed for the natural world in their practices today.

The purpose of this thesis is to show, through a study of the letters and a comparison of the journals and poems, the extent of the influence of Dorothy Wordsworth on the poetry of William Wordsworth and to bring together for the first time evidence of her influence.

My thesis studies Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth to redress the unjust neglect of Hartley’s work, and to reach a more positive understanding of Dorothy’s conflicted literary relationship with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I provide a complete reassessment of the often narrowly read prose and poetry of these two critically marginalized figures, and also investigate the relationships that affected their lives, literary self-constructions, and reception; in this way, I restore a more accurate account of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers, and also highlight both the inhibiting and cathartic affects of writing from within a familial literary context. My analysis of the writings of Hartley and Dorothy and the dialogues in which they engage with the works of STC and William, argues that both Hartley and Dorothy developed a strong relational poetics in their endeavour to demarcate their independent subjectivities. Furthermore, through a survey of the significance of the sibling bond – literal and figurative – in the texts and lives of all these writers, I demonstrate a theory of influence which recognizes lateral, rather than paternal, kinship as the most influential relationship. I thus conclude that authorial identity is not fundamentally predetermined by, and dependent on, gender or literary inheritance, but is more significantly governed by domestic environment, familial readership, and immediate kinship. My thesis challenges the long-standing misconceptions that Hartley was unable to achieve a strong poetic identity in STC’s shadow, and that Dorothy’s independent authorial endeavour was primarily thwarted by gender. To replace these misreadings, I foreground the successful literary independence of both writers: my approach reinstates Hartley Coleridge’s literary standing as a major poet who bridged Romanticism and Victorian literature, and promotes Dorothy Wordsworth as one of the finest descriptive writers of nature and relationship.