Tesi di laurea triennale in Letteratura inglese: Dorothy Wordsworth s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland rephrasing the transcendental landscape aesthetics of travel writing

Ithwriting stimulus: on April 17, 1802 Dorothy wrote a letter, ending with "saw a robin chasing a scarlet butterfly this morning"; the day after William "composed the poem Robin and the Butterfly".

It is interesting to underline that Dorothy and William were even baptized together, at All Saints' Church in Cockermouth, as if they were twins. This event is highly emblematical of the close companionship that would bound the two siblings throughout their life.

It is important to underline that Dorothy was not in the service of William, sharing "not their brotherly affection created a co-dependency on each other, the speech but the mood", in Virginia Woolf's words, since they resorted to different forms of the same sensibility as far as being respectively regarded "the diarist" and "the poet".

Dorothy's contribution, William was explicitly since he composed "The Sparrow's Nest" different poems to honor and pay tribute to his sister. is one of the most representative gratitude celebration: She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble care, and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; 18 And love, and thought, and joy. Their loss of parents, of a permanent home and of all their possessions, drove them to live symbiotically, creating a communal Wordsworthian identity, on a personal, introspective level, as well as on a poetic and professional one.

Three Persons, One Soul In The Common Reader: Second Series, Virginia Woolf introduces us to the idea of trinity, which relates Dorothy and William with Nature, romantically 19 turning themselves in a self-contained and independent being. Notwithstanding, it behooves us to think about another significant trio, constituted by the two siblings and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The three spent all their time together, compulsively.

focusing on some natural aspects of spring coming:

Through primrose-tufts, in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreathes;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The same year, Dorothy wrote her Alfoxden Journal, in which she observed and documented spring progressing through landscape.

On the 24 March she recorded:
[…] The spring continues to advance very slowly, no green trees, the[…] hedges leafless.

And later, on the 12 April, with a verbless clause underlining the perception of a natural process, almost in the form of a catalogue, she noted:
[…] The spring advances rapidly, multitudes of primroses, dog-violets, periwinkles, stitchwort.

21 L. Newlyn, 2013, p. 53.
22 W. Wordsworth, in R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones (eds.), 1991, p. 70 (ll. 9-12).
23 D. Wordsworth, in W.M. Knight (ed.), 1904, p. 14.
24 Ivi, p. 16. 23 “Work Without As answering to this lyrical dialogue, Coleridge would write Hope” (1825), a sonnet

relating his emotions to springtime: –All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair– –The bees are stirring birds are on the wing And Winter slumbering in the open air, 25 Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring.

According to the English author and critic Frances Wilson, Dorothy’s affection for Coleridge was a kind of reflection of her love for William, as if 26 she extended his brotherly feelings to her friend.

In other critics’ perspectives Coleridge had a fond attachment to Dorothy a result of his only sister’s death because of a compensatory relationship, as 27 happened in 1791, a few years before he and the Wordsworths met.

Whatever the reasons may be, there is no question that William, Dorothy and Coleridge participated in each other’s lives, hence the statement: “tho’ we 28 were three persons, it was but one soul”, attributed to Coleridge.

From Loss to Subjectivity In Dorothy’s life there is a persistent sense of loss.

When Anne Wordsworth died in 1778, Dorothy lost both her parents and her brothers, along with her adolescence, Dorothy's deprivation was family perception. During compensated by "Aunt Elizabeth" and other significant figures, such as her friend Jane Pollard. As a matter of fact, in her letters to Jane, written after she 25 S.T. Coleridge, in J.C.C. Mays (ed.), Poetical Works Vol.1, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001, pp. 1032-1033 (ll. 1-4). 26 F. Wilson, 2008. 27 L. Davidoff, 2012, p. 208. 28 R. Aldrich, 1962, pp. 61-62.

This sentence has been attributed to Coleridge for several years, but during the 1960s some literary critics have found out the misquotation. The actual phrase written by Coleridge in 1801 was "tho' we were three persons, it was but one God", and it has been altered in 1886, when Alois Brandl translated Coleridge's works in German. The problem was his omission of the full context, which created a change in the original.

According to some scholars, the authentic quotation may refer to a sort of silent agreement that William was the jewel in the crown of their threesome friendship.²⁴ Dorothy wistfully remembered her days spent with her aunt, "I frequently thinking to her activities in the community life: [...] thinking upon our past pleasures, when we used to roam in search of bilberries with our black porringers in our hands."²⁹ This excerpt, addressed to Jane, underlines Dorothy's tendency to reminiscing, which exalts her past happy days. But still her sense of loss emerges, even in the context of her letters. In 1787, William along with his brothers John and Christopher spent three weeks at Penrith, in company of his sister; but when he left for Cambridge, Dorothy experienced another privation. In one of her letters to Jane, she would write, "You know not how forlorn and dull I find myself now that my brothers are gone."

It is curious to notice that her retrospective nostalgy is quite selective: she– – more on her brother’s departure than on her parents’ focused and suffered loss. The “day of my felicity”, for Dorothy, corresponds to “the day in which I am once more to find a Home under the same Roof with my Brother”

Her hope to recreate domesticity is always defined by her brother, who gave her shelter from an alien reality, i.e. her life in Penrith. As a result, we can say that Dorothy considered William as a figure both fraternal and parental, who her “a sort of restless watchfulness […] a succeeded in addressing Tenderness that never sleeps”

Dorothy’s self is fragile, weakened and undermined by the perpetual loss in her life. Her subjectivity and identity are strictly related to her ambition to “her heart’s desire” create a home, fulfilled only once settled with William at Dove Cottage, where she

Affection for Nature and a peculiar feeling of respect for its alterity, regardless of how it could impress indeed she "thought38her state of mind, [the dead woman] was going to a quiet spot and [she] could not help weeping very much". Mellor has extensively analyzed Dorothy's subjectivity, particularly in one of Dorothy's poems published within the of her brother's works, "The corpus Floating Island" (1842):35 A. Mellor, 1993, p. 166 (emphasis added).36 Ivi, p. 157.37 D. Wordsworth, in W.M. Knight (ed.), 1904, pp. 48-4