SOURCE: Cook, Kay K. “Immersion.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 10, no. 1 (spring 1995): 66-80.

In the following essay, Cook claims that Wordsworth's journals constitute autobiography despite the absence of the first person pronoun.

The following passage from Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere journal captures fragments of a day in early autumn. The year is 1800, and Wordsworth and her brother William have recently moved into Dove Cottage, Grasmere, in the English Lake District:

[September] 14th, Sunday Morning. Made bread. A sore thumb from a cut. A lovely day. Read Boswell in the house in the morning, and after dinner under the bright yellow leaves of the orchard. The pear trees a bright yellow. The apple trees green still. A sweet lovely afternoon.

(62-3)

Two years later, in the spring of 1802, Dorothy and William are still living in Grasmere, but their time alone is about to draw to a close; William will marry...