Dorothy Wordsworth’s Experimental Style

In her essay on Dorothy Wordsworth in The Common Reader, VirginiaWoolf set an important critical precedent. Contrasting Dorothy's prose – accurate, restrained, unselfconscious – with that of Mary Wollstonecraft – reformist, passionate, hypersensitive – she wrote:

Dorothy never railed against 'the cloven hoof of despotism'. Dorothy never asked 'men's questions' about exports and imports; Dorothy never confused her own soul with the sky. This 'I so much alive' was ruthlessly subordinated to the trees and the grass. For if she let 'I' and its rights and its wrongs and its passions and its suffering get between her and the object, she would be calling the moon 'the Queen of the Night'; she would be talking of dawn's 'orient beams'; she would be soaring into reveries and rhapsodies and forgetting to find the exact phrase for the ripple of moonlight upon the lake. It was like 'herrings in the water' – she could not have said that if she had been thinking about herself.¹

The contrast here between artificiality and sensibility on one hand, veracity and naturalness on the other, corresponds to Schiller's distinction between the 'sentimental' and the 'naive' in poetry. In modern feminist readings of Dorothy's journals, it is the male poet William Wordsworth, rather than the female prose-writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who provides a foil for Dorothy's achievement.² Her prose is selfless, they argue, whereas William's poetry magnifies the self, achieving what Keats called the 'egotistical sublime'.

Although something of interest is preserved in these Schillerian antinomies, something else is in danger of being forgotten or obscured: what we might call Dorothy's personality, or voice, or 'character'. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton were perhaps alluding to Keats's definition of the 'poetical character' – 'it has no character'³ – when they wrote that 'the paradox of her unique style is that it is no style. . . . The acute observation by Dorothy is there, but no Dorothy herself. Every object, sight, sound is allowed its own nature'.⁴ Dorothy did indeed have a 'unique style'. It emerged in response to the changing conditions of her life, and she crafted it deliberately. Her Alfoxden and Grasmere journals are not self-reflexive works of aesthetic theory (in the way that Keats's letters often are), but they do nonetheless illuminate her developing ideas about language and memory, human beings and the natural world. Her identity is everywhere implicit in her writing – in the aesthetic and political allegiances she discloses, in the feelings she writes about, obliquely or openly, and above all in the idiosyncrasies of phrasing, syntax, and rhythm that constitute her voice. In reading her prose 'we get to know Dorothy', as Pamela Woof succinctly and rightly puts it.⁵

She was 27, and a fluent letter-writer, when she made her first entry in the Alfoxden journal on 20 January 1798. The lease on the house she and her brother were renting was running out, and later that year they would depart for Germany. It seems probable that she began writing as away of expressing her attachment to a home she was soon to lose. But the journal does not begin with the immediate environs of Alfoxden house – 'a large mansion in a large park, with seventy head of deer', as she described it in a letter.⁶ Instead, it opens with a description of a warm day in the Quantocks at the end of winter:

The green paths down the hill-sides are channels for streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more populous. It peoples itself in the sunbeams.

(p. 141)

The sentences are more formal than in later entries, and written in the present tense, as if to announce a theme. This gives them a celebratory mood – almost psalmic – but there is nothing else to suggest that this is the first entry in a first journal. No mention of the eye that observes; no statement of intent in writing. The 'living prospect'⁷ is assembled sequentially...