WORDSWORTH, DOROTHY , English writer and diarist, the third child and only daughter of John Wordsworth, of Cockermouth, and his wife, Anne Cookson Crackanthorpe, was born on Dec. 25, 1771, and, after her mother's death in 1778, lived chiefly at Halifax with a Mrs. Threlkeld, her mother's cousin. In 1787 she went to live with her maternal grand-parents in Penrith, where she was not very happy. From 1788-93 she stayed with an uncle at Forncett, in Norfolk. She and her brother William, the poet, who was a year older than Dorothy, were early drawn to one another; in 1794 they visited the Lakes together, and in the autumn of the following year they combined their small capitals and set up house at Racedown, in Dorsetshire, where they lived a frugal but ideally happy life. In 1797 they made the acquaintance of Coleridge, and in the same year moved to Alf oxden, on the northern slope of the Quantock hills, Coleridge about the same time settling near by in the town of Nether Stowey. On Jan. 20, 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth began her invaluable Journal, used by successive biographers of her brother, but first printed in its quasi-entirety by Prof. W. Knight in 1897. The Wordsworths, Coleridge and Chester, left England for Germany on Sept. 14, 1798; and of this journey also Dorothy Wordsworth preserved an account, portions of which were pub lished in 1897. On May 14, 1800, she started another Journal at Dove cottage, Grasmere, which she kept very fully until Dec. 31 of the same year. She resumed it on Jan. 1, 1802, for another 12 months, closing on Jan. 1803. These were printed first in 1889. She composed Recollections of a Tour in Scotland, in 1803, with her brother and Coleridge; this was first published in Her next contribution to the family history was her Journal of a Mountain Ramble, in Nov. 1805, an account of a walking tour in
the Lake District with her brother. In July 1820 the Wordsworths made a tour on the Continent, of which Dorothy preserved a very careful record, portions of which were given to the world in the writer having refused to publish it in 1824 on the ground that her "object was not to make a book, but to leave to her niece a neatly-penned memorial of those few interesting months of our lives." Meanwhile, without her brother, but in the company of Joanna Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth had travelled over Scotland in 1822, and had composed a Journal of that tour. In 1829 she had a serious nervous breakdown, from which she never recovered. For the last 26 years of her life her mind and body seemed broken ; she died on Jan. 25, 1855, five years after Wil liam's death in 1850.
Dorothy Wordsworth claims a distinct place in the history of English prose as one of the very earliest writers who noted, in language delicately chosen, and with no other object than to preserve their fugitive beauty, the little picturesque phenomena of homely country life amid simple scenes and quiet people.