Biography dorothy wordsworth manuscript

Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth (25 December 1771 – 25 January 1855) was an English author, poet, and diarist.
Wordsworth, Dorothy (1771-1855), English writer and diarist, was the third child and only daughter of John Wordsworth of Cockermouth and his wife, Anne Cookson.
Biography.

•

Dorothy Wordsworth

For the poet, daughter of William Wordsworth, see Dora Wordsworth.

English author, poet and diarist

Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth (25 December 1771 – 25 January 1855) was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Dorothy Wordsworth had no ambitions to be a public author, yet she left behind numerous letters, diary entries, topographical descriptions, poems, and other writings.

Early life and education

Dorothy Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland on December 25, 1771. She was the sister of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and the third of five children born to Ann Cookson and John Wordsworth. Following the death of her mother in 1778, Dorothy was sent alone to live with her second cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, in Halifax, West Yorkshire until 1787. During this period, Dorothy attended boarding school at Hipperholme before transferring to a day-school in Halifax.^[1]

In 1787, Dorothy moved to her grandparents' house in Pen

•

Introduction to Dorothy Wordsworth's Lake District

On Christmas Day of 2021, admirers of Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) around the world celebrated the sestercentennial of a writer who, after long years in her elder brother’s shadow, has at last gained an independent reputation. Dorothy (fig. 1) is now widely known as one of nineteenth-century England’s most perspicacious nature writers and keen-eyed chroniclers of the everyday. There has never been a better time to study her life and work, as besides an ever-growing body of biographical and critical studies, recent decades have seen the arrival of several important print collections of her writings, including the first-ever classroom anthology of her “greatest hits” as a diarist, travel writer, and poet.

⁽¹⁾

See Susan Levin’s classroom anthology Dorothy Wordsworth: A Longman Cultural Edition (2009). Other important additions to the modern DW library include Pamela Woof’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (2002) and Carol Kyros Walker’s illustrated edition of DW’s Recolle

•

Biography

Dorothy Wordsworth was the middle child of five, with two older brothers including William Wordsworth and two younger brothers. Her mother died when she was six, her father when she was twelve. Separated from her brothers, Wordsworth lived in the care of relatives, then worked caring for their children when she was older. After years of seeing her brothers only on holidays, when in her early twenties Wordsworth moved to Alfoxden with William. Here she kept a journal of their activities, including their frequent meetings with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then living with his wife and child at nearby Nether Stowey.

As an unmarried woman, Wordsworth was dependent upon her brother and lived with him even after he married and had his own family. In later life, she became ill, both physically and mentally, and probably addicted to laudanum.

Texts

Poetry

Journals

Alfoxden Journal

April 15, 1798

Set forward after breakfast to Crookham, and returned to dinner at three o’clock. A fine cloudy morning. Walked about the squire’s grounds. Quaint waterfalls about, about