‘Her eyes were not soft, as Mrs. Wordsworth’s, nor were they fierce or bold; but they were wild and startling, and hurried in their motion. Her manner was warm and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her, which, being alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by the irrepressible instincts of her temperament, and then immediately checked, in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age, and her maidenly condition, gave to her whole demeanour, and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment, and even self-conflict, that was most distressing to witness’ (Thomas De Quincey). Born in Cockermouth, third child and only daughter of Ann and John Wordsworth, land agent, one year after William. After her mother’s death when she was six, was brought up by relatives, but set up home with William in 1795, moving to Dove Cottage, Grasmere, in 1797. Her sensitively-written journals recount their life together and her response to the natural world. Was very distressed at William’s marriage; contracted a near-fatal fever in 1829; from 1835 to her death, frequently insane. Little she wrote was published in her lifetime. ‘During the last years of her life her poetry was paramount. She copied and recopied her verses; she recited them continually … Most obviously, her poems exist intertex tually with those of her brother … The poetic presence of her brother made it difficult for Dorothy to write poetry’ (Levin).
Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers State UP, 1987), includes the poems; Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980).