SOURCE: Wolfson, Susan J. “Individual in Community: Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William.” In Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor, pp. 139-66. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Wolfson asserts that Dorothy Wordsworth's poetry reveals a desire to investigate and, in some cases, reject William Wordsworth's “favored tropes and figures.”

I

Dorothy Wordsworth is known primarily as a writer of journals and recollections, and though passages in these works have impressed readers such as Virginia Woolf with “the gift of the poet,” her actual poetry has attracted little critical attention and even less acclaim.¹ The usual remark is that it lacks literary merit, especially when compared to that of the other writer and chief poet of the household, William Wordsworth. More recently, her poems have been read as documents revealing the inhibitions of “a literary tradition that depends on and reinforces the masculine orientation...