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Around tea-time on December 20, 1799, just as the light was failing, aspiring poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy arrived at a small white-washed cottage in the hamlet of Town End, in the Vale of Grasmere, in the English Lake District. This was to be their home for the following eight and a half years: a home recorded and eulogised in both their writings. A creative home, in which the days were filled with reading, writing, walking, and gardening. It will be the first real home they have had together since their mother died when William was only seven and Dorothy six, and Dorothy was sent to live with relatives. Dorothy recorded their daily life in Grasmere in a journal, which fed into William’s poems: poems that would at first be ridiculed by critics, and later make him famous around the world. 208 years and six months later, give or take a day, I moved into an attic room three doors up the road. This is where my relationship with Dorothy Wordsworth begins.
I moved to Grasmere to do field research for a doctoral degree. My focus was not just on literature, it was on Grasmere itself; on how a place becomes a particular place, and what William Wordsworth and his poetry had to do with creating, intentionally or unintentionally, the Grasmere I came to live in. My research was based at the Wordsworth Trust, a museum and archive centred around the home the Wordsworth siblings had moved to in 1799. Under the name of Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s home at Grasmere has been a museum and literary shrine since 1890. Today, the Wordsworth Trust presents the cottage as ‘the inspirational home of William Wordsworth’, inviting visitors to ‘Discover Wordsworth Country’. The Trust has grown to encompass a museum, a research centre and archive, a shop, a tea-room, and numerous offices and houses, ever evolving and changing. In 1997 it was granted designated collection status and named as The Centre for British Romanticism. In 2020, to celebrate William’s 250th birthday, it was rebranded Wordsworth Grasmere. The Wordsworth Trust has been proud to claim it is the only writer’s house museum which also houses the primary scholarly resource for that author. It means William, of course, not Dorothy, or any of the other writers who have inhabited the cottage since.
Under the terms of my funding, I would work for the Wordsworth Trust, learning about the place and how it worked.… Before I moved to Grasmere, I knew almost nothing about Dorothy Wordsworth. I knew she was the sister of the more famous poet, William. I knew she kept a journal. I knew her journals were important to her brother’s poems. That’s probably it. I knew nothing about her life, nothing about her writing. My mum gave me The Illustrated Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth as a present to celebrate getting accepted onto the doctoral programme. I did not know that what was included or not included in those journals – how the sentences were written, what punctuation was used, and what word choices – was an editorial decision and not Dorothy’s own. I didn’t know that there were different versions of her journals that said different things, included and excluded different details. I did not know there were parts of her journals that had been blacked out, that had been cut out. I did not know that these were not the only journals. I certainly didn’t know then how important Dorothy would become to me. That I would still be discovering new things about Dorothy fifteen years later. That I would come to understand Dorothy not as a silent support to the genius poet, but as an essential equal partner in a creative project that included the making of a life, as well as the making of poems. That that would help me make my own life, as best as I could. That in my darkest moments, I would find in her pain a way to help me understand, and articulate, my own. By the time I finished my studies I thought I knew Dorothy, or knew my Dorothy. I thought I understood who I thought she was. But there were parts of Dorothy’s life I knew nothing about, just as there were parts of the history of Dove Cottage I knew nothing about. I would move away, move back, graduate, and fail to move away again before I would first hear about Dorothy’s other journals, written from 1824 to 1835, but never published.Dorothy Wordsworth is praised as a nature writer, and as a woman who walked and climbed. She is admired for her physical vitality as well as for her writing: for walking long distances, for stamina, strength, and a certain wildness. Her worth as a writer has become tied to her physical capacity by book after book which repeats these connections. Fewer people know that Dorothy became increasingly unwell later in life and was largely housebound from 1835. She lived another twenty years after that, dying on January 25, 1855, at the age of 84, outliving her brother by five years. This later Dorothy is completely unknown to most of her readers.
