1. “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears”
Dorothy Wordsworth
“She gave me eyes, she gave me ears”
~ “The Sparrow’s Nest”

2. Feminist Critique of W. Wordsworth
E.g. Anne Mellor
Wordsworth finally replaces (feminine) nature with the productions of the (masculine) imagination, inevitably substituting for his felt experiences of the physical world a linguistically mediated memory of them, mediations which confine his consciousness to a solipsistic subjectivity, one that is troped as male. (Romanticism and Gender, 20)
Love between them?

3. Wordsworth’s Love for Mary
William Wordsworth: A Poetic Life
John Mahoney Fordham UP, 1996

4. 1. What’s typical of her styles as a diarist?
2. How is her description of the daffodils different from that of Wordsworth?
Dorothy’s Style
Oct. 3rd &
April 15, 1802, Grasmere Journal

5. Oct. 3rd , 1800 Grasmere Journal W’s "Resolution and Independence" (1802 1807)
Listing the things she’s done; no closure.
Detailed about the persons and things she met.
e.g. The leech gatherer:
Appearance: A coat over his shoulder, dark eyes and long nose….
Birth
Family
Work, income and injuries
Wordsworth: views the man as having been sent "To give [him] human strength, by apt admonishment".

6. April 15, 1802, Grasmere Journal
A process of discovery:
Stormy weather
hawthorn black and green, birches greenish with purple
Into a field (with different kinds of plants)
A few, then more and more …
I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd A host of dancing Daffodils; Along the Lake, beneath the trees, Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.