Dorothy Wordsworth 250 Years On

Christmas Day, 2021, was Dorothy’s Wordsworth’s 250th birthday. To celebrate, the department of English Literature and Creative Writing have brought together two distinguished authors, both of whom have written extensively about and around the figure of Dorothy. Polly Atkin’s work includes Recovering Dorothy The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021) and Sarah Corbett’s work includes A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion Poetry, 2018), the central sequence of which draws on Dorothy’s Grasmere Journals. Both authors also teach in the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing here at Lancaster.
Polly Atkin, Recovering Dorothy The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021)
This book is about the Dorothy we don’t know - disabled, housebound - who makes her sick room into a garden for herself and her pet robin, and who is finally able to call herself a poet. Recovering Dorothy draws on the unpublished journals of her illness to place the whole Dorothy back into her own life story
Sarah Corbett, A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion Poetry, 2018)
Walking, getting lost, and finding that home is half way between refuge and a place to look out from at the unsettling and unsettled world, are the dominant themes in Sarah Corbett's fifth collection. Written from an intimate knowledge of the countryside of the Calder Valley, many of these poems respond to a landscape as beautiful as it is disquieting, troubled by a warming climate and by violence and loss both public and private. A central sequence - part found poem, part assemblage - draws on the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, poems that question the nature of the visionary, the in-between worlds that this poet claims as her territory; here nature is held up as a mirror where we might see ourselves and our actions reflected. Over all haunts the presence-in-absence of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place the author can see from her bedroom window. Throughout, interior lights - a train on a dark morning, a sudden snowfall, moonlight and starlight, sun on lake water, the love between a parent and child - attempt to balance the darkness.

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