Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author

Gillian Beattie-Smith

doi:10.31261/https://doi.org/10.31261/PS_P.2021.27.03

Published: 2021-06-30

Vol. 27 No. 1 (2021)

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author

Gillian Beattie-Smith

Section: Women’s Travel Narratives from the 19th Century until Today

https://doi.org/10.31261/https://doi.org/10.31261/PS_P.2021.27.03

Abstract

The increase in popularity of the Home Tour in the 19th century and the publication of many journals, diaries, and guides of tours of Scotland by, such as, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, led to the perception of Scotland as a literary tour destination. The tour of Scotland invariably resulted in a journal in which identities such as writer, traveller, observer, were created. The text became a location for the pursuit of a sense of place and identity. For women in particular, the text offered opportunities to be accepted as a writer and commentator. Dorothy Wordsworth made two journeys to Scotland: the first, in 1803, with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second, in 1822 with Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Mary, her brother’s wife. This paper considers Dorothy’s identity constructed in those Scottish journals. Discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth have tended to consider her identity through familial relationship, and those of her writing by what is lacking in her work. Indeed, her work and her writing are frequently subsumed into the plural of ‘the Wordsworths’. This paper considers the creation of individual self in her work, and discusses the social and spatial construction of identity in Dorothy’s discourse in her journals about Scotland.

Keywords:

Dorothy Wordsworth , women’s travel writing , walking, identity , Scotland

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Beattie-Smith, G. (2021). Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author. Postscriptum Polonistyczne, 27(1), 51–67. https://doi.org/10.31261/https://doi.org/10.31261/PS_P.2021.27.03

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Gillian Beattie-Smith

G.L.Beattie-Smith@open.ac.uk
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5909-1400

Affiliation:

The Open University: Milton Keynes, GB United Kingdom

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

GILLIAN BEATTIE-SMITH – PhD, The Open University, Milton Keynes, Great Britain.
Gillian Beattie-Smith lectures in English, in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, at The Open University, where she has taught for nine years. Her research focuses on women’s creation of identity in their travel writing of the nineteenth century. She lives in the Scottish Borders.

Vol. 27 No. 1 (2021)
Published: 2021-06-30

ISSN: 1898-1593

eISSN: 2353-9844

10.31261/PS_P

Publisher

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

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Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author

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Gillian Beattie-Smith

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