Shared Recollections: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Scottish Tour of 1803

This essay examines the composition, publication and reception of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803. Manuscript versions of Recollections are interpreted as sociable texts exchanged by marginal women figures of the Wordsworths’ literary circle; as tools for Romantic cooperative writing, moving between prose and verse; and as later life emblems of agency and mobility. Building on existing research on literary sociability as well as manuscript circulation, this essay considers the permeable nature of Romantic women’s books, resituating them as intrinsic to the development of individual and communal literary identities and bibliographies in the period.