The Guardian view on Dorothy Wordsworth: a rare achievement
She has been described as “probably the most remarkable and the most distinguished of English prose writers who never wrote a line for the general public”; many have also argued that she directly influenced the course of English poetry.
Dorothy Wordsworth, born 250 years ago on Christmas Day, was not an obvious candidate for such accolades, being the third of five children, orphaned then farmed out to relatives – “squandered abroad”, as she later said, quoting The Merchant of Venice. When she met her brothers again, she found in William a soulmate; they would live together for the rest of their lives.
Her journals of their days, of the household (which she ran), and especially of landscape and seasons, were mined by her brother and sometimes by his friends for images, ideas, phrases. Strikingly, it was Dorothy who noted a wide belt of daffodils along a lake that “tossed and reeled and danced”, but this is only one small, albeit famous, instance of their collaboration; “Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry,” as Virginia Woolf would later put it. The poetscholar Lucy Newlyn has argued that they were equal partners in writing, and William was always openly grateful: “She, in the midst of it all, preserved me still / A Poet, made me seek beneath that name, / My office upon earth” (The Prelude, 1805). “She has left her benign influence upon all later Romantic poets,” wrote Arthur QuillerCouch. “She gave them eyes, she gave them ears.”
But she was far more than a skilled collaborator. Woolf wrote of how the quality of Dorothy’s noticing, and her utter commitment to accuracy in recording that noticing, gave rise to a particular beauty of prose, and even “the gift of the poet”; other critics have seen how in the journals certain lines lift free into poetry. She wrote discrete poems, too, and, having a complex relationship with publicity, published a few anonymously.
Generations of readers of her Grasmere journals acknowledge Dorothy as a first-rank nature writer; in her assumption of humans as “Companions of Nature” (rather than overlords) she is arguably also an early environmentalist, deeply aware and celebratory of the balance of nature. She is a major figure in the growing history of women walking – in defiance of social expectation, she walked for miles in the Lake District, Scotland and, later, mainland Europe, of which travels she also kept journals.
Finally, a new book by poet-critic Polly Atkin argues for Dorothy’s place in the writing of illness, mentions of which began to appear early but are especially evident in less well-known late journals, kept when she was increasingly bedbound and troubled but refused to give up on things that brought her intellectual stimulation and joy. Eventually, the outdoors was brought in, in the form of growing plants and flowers, and even a pet robin, which “cheared [sic] my bed-room with its slender subdued piping”. A narrowing world, she reminds us, need not lead to a narrowing of the self.