I was so delighted when my copy of Dorothy Wordsworth's Rydal Journals arrived yesterday. I've been waiting for so long for this book to be published; I'd almost completely given up hope! But is is so worth waiting for.
Previously only brief segments of the fifteen notebook diaries that Dorothy Wordsworth filled between 1824 and 1835 – known collectively as the Rydal Journals – have appeared in previous collections of her works. This edition of the entirety of these later journals represents a signal event for those interested in Dorothy or the wider field of Romanticism.
The Rydal Journals cover a pivotal decade in Dorothy’s life, chronicling her transition from an indefatigable fifty-three-year-old in her physical and intellectual prime to a rapidly declining sixty-three-year-old confined to an upstairs sickroom at Rydal Mount. The Journals offer both a heightened appreciation of her remarkable gift for capturing the pleasures of everyday life and an affecting account of the onset of disability and old age.
This is a whopper of a book, which is so delightful. I'm so looking forward to reading it. I've always wanted to read the full Journal Dorothy kept whilst she was in the Isle of Man, so I think this is where I will start.