SOURCE: Vlasopolos, Anca. “Texted Selves: Dorothy and William Wordsworth in The Grasmere Journals.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14, no. 1 (summer 1999): 118-36.

In the following essay, Vlasopolos considers The Grasmere Journals in the context of late-twentieth-century notions of gender and authorial integrity.

Offering and Taking Dorothy's Textual Self

Anyone undertaking a reading of The Grasmere Journals will be going over much traveled terrain, especially in regard to the relations between Dorothy and William during those crucial years that confirmed Dorothy as William's lifetime companion and William as a poet. To the able and subtle exegeses of Dorothy's Journals, I add late-twentieth-century interrogations about authorial integrity, about resistance to domestication and complicity with it in the construction of gendered textual personae. The Grasmere Journals is the production of an intellectual, audience-driven author who succeeds in creating a textual self so convincing as to have been taken for the “real” Dorothy...