SOURCE: Tyler, Lisa. “Big Brother Is Watching You: Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals.” University of Dayton Review 23, no. 2 (spring 1995): 87-98.

In the following essay, an abbreviated version of which was presented in 1993, Tyler reads Wordsworth absence from her journals as a narrative strategy of self-protection designed to prevent her brother from appropriating her personal observations.

The chief observation—and critique—that virtually everyone makes regarding Dorothy Wordsworth's journals is that they display an alarming absence of subjectivity. Critics use almost identical terms to describe this quality in the journals: Bruce Bawer notes that “perhaps what is most arresting about them is their utter unself-consciousness” (30); Ernest de Selincourt describes her journals as “entirely without self-consciousness” (78). Margaret Homans notes “Dorothy's tendency to omit a central or prominent self” (Women 73). Richard Fadem comments, “If Dorothy is notable, as every biographer agrees, for her utter selflessness, she is also remarkable for...