While we’re experiencing issues with our online admissions for Dove Cottage and Museum, please contact us by phone on 015394 35544 or by email at enquiries@wordsworth.org.uk to enquire about booking. Our special events can still be booked through the site as normal.
Dorothy: Writer, Sister, Friend
23 October 2021 – 4 September 2022
This is Dorothy Wordsworth’s story, told in her own words from original manuscripts in celebration of her 250th birthday.
Dorothy Wordsworth was more than William’s sister. She was a writer, friend, collaborator, aunt, pioneering walker, local philanthropist, inspiring gardener, and – perhaps most famously – author of the Grasmere journal.
She was an extraordinary, yet relatable, woman: a writer, sister, and friend of the nineteenth century and for the twenty-first.
Visit to see…
Special treasures from the Wordsworth Trust’s collection will be on display, including original letters, tour accounts and journals written by Dorothy:
- The Grasmere journal – her most famous and well-known work.
- Her Rydal journal – unpublished and subject of new research – rarely displayed before
- Many letters, including the earliest one to survive, written when she was sixteen (her last surviving letter is also on display)
- Her accounts of travels across Scotland and continental Europe
- A narrative written to raise funds for village children, orphaned when their parents perished in a blizzard
- Her account of climbing England’s highest mountain, the earliest surviving such account written by a woman
- A touching description of her nephew John’s first words
Alongside the manuscripts will be displayed responses of people living today, exploring and responding to Dorothy’s life and words from a variety of perspectives, including:
Grasmere Women’s Institute, exploring which aspects of Dorothy’s life and writing inspires them, and what it means to be a woman living in Grasmere today
Vision Support Barrow and District in collaboration with artist Lee Hassall, discussing descriptions and perceptions of landscape found in Dorothy’s travel writing
Refugees now living in West Yorkshire and Manchester, discovering Grasmere Vale whilst walking in Dorothy’s footsteps with her words to hand
Members of the aromantic asexual community, exploring Dorothy’s role as a friend, and the importance of their own close friendships. View the companion zine
I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.
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