Extract from Dear Dorothy

Kiera Hayles

She was here. On Earth and in her house.

Marie Darrieussecq, Being Here

Contextual Note: These two chapters appear midway through ‘Dear Dorothy’. Written in diary-form, the narrator has to this point explored the literary, historical and cultural significance of diaries, through which she unearths Dorothy Wordsworth and her journals. This leads the narrator to visit the Lake District in pursual of a closeness to Dorothy, who has become a confidant (so much so that the narrator’s ‘dear diary’ address is gradually replaced by ‘dear Dorothy’) and in many ways, a mirror to the narrator. 

Rydal Mount

July 2024

Dear Dorothy, 

It is Sunday, and I have seen you. 

Signs leading up to Rydal let us know we were on track to reach the ‘great’ William Wordsworth’s house, no sign of you yet. We parked our car at Rydal Mount, unsure if we were in the right place and balanced precariously on a very steep slope. Out the car, lunch at the ready, the first mission was to find a suitable picnic bench. As we approached a wooden gate at the bottom of the makeshift-carpark, I saw the first of many chalkboards and laminated sheets with the words of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’. Where it all began for me. A circular moment. And just as infuriating as the first time I read your diary entry, to realise you inspired the words of that poem. No credit for you at the gate of your home though, I’m afraid. 

The side of the cottage peeked out from under vine and indiscernible foliage, and I glanced over, but I was not yet willing to fully acknowledge its presence. I went into a small building to the left instead, seemingly a hybrid café / visitor centre / gift shop, squeezed into what I later found out was your niece’s schoolroom. I asked the cashier about parking and exploring the house and grounds, and she sorted our day tickets for us. While she was tapping away at the till, I asked, ‘Do you happen to know if the portrait of Dorothy is in this house?’ – the only portrait I could find of you online, the portrait whose face and eyes first lured me into the purchase of your journals. Face framed by frills, intently staring back at the onlooker, somehow both stern and vulnerable, focal lenses gripped loosely, as if just taken off in a moment of disruption to say – yes, can I help you? – your journal open in front of you, quill and ink on desk, companion pet at your side, armchair a deep red, shawl a muddied brown, flowers and sky peeking out of a window behind you. 

The cashier took a moment to think, but before she could answer, a barista behind her turned from whatever drink she was making to smile at me and answer, yes, the portrait was here. I smiled back at her and thanked her, feeling slightly smug that I had signalled how, unlike most visitors, I was not here for William, but for you. As the cashier finished ringing through our tickets she gave me the receipts and said, ‘One second’, at which she rifled through a small wooden box to the side of the till and brought out a postcard – your portrait. I gave her my most charming smile and gushed my thanks as I gripped the small shining card in my hands, my own portable portrait, whose eyes seemed to glint more than they ever did on the laptop screen. 

I left the café / visitor centre / gift shop / schoolroom to finally face the house. It was somehow both humble and grand. A hybrid of thatched cottage and manor home, with a canopied entrance slightly off-centre, it stood on the top of the hill like an outlook post, or with the dignity even of a castle. Still not yet ready to venture within, I walked away from the home, down wide cascading slate steps into the front garden, soon coming across (according to the map the visitor centre gave me) a ninth-century Norse mound – impressively historic and functional as a very pleasant lunch spot, sheltered from the view of other visitors and overlooking Windermere. I imagined you had sat in the same spot, impressed by its history or just enjoying its view. 

Skirting the peripheries of the grounds, the house sang from behind me, but I didn’t quite feel invited in yet. So, I turned the corner from the bottom of the mound to come upon the Daffodil Field – barren of daffodils, thanks to the time of the year. But I stopped for a moment to imagine what it might look like brimming with yellow. Daffodil, the flower of the famous Wordsworth poem, the first diary entry I ever read of yours, and suddenly, I remembered a car journey with my mum. It was just a drive home from somewhere local, but we drove past a roadside-green littered with daffodils. My mum told me that she always associated daffodils with grieving her mother, as she had died around the time that they bloomed, before I was born – not like how you died before I was born, Dorothy, a couple years, not a couple hundred. But staring at the empty Daffodil Field picturing that roadside-green, I thought of my mother’s grief, and I imagined my grandmother, and I read in the visitor’s guide that William and Mary (and you are not mentioned, but I know you were involved) planted the field full of daffodils after the death of their daughter, Dora, who was named after you, and I think that is quite beautiful, and I think grief is cyclical, like flower fields barren then in bloom, and somehow both so personal but so universal – and my mirage dissipated as my dad walked past me muttering to himself, there are no daffodils in the daffodil field. 

Yet, in the absence of daffodils I was struck by one particularly vibrant hydrangea bush, a brilliant blue. It partly reminded me of my own garden at home, but it was the difference that drew me in, as my hydrangeas bloom a sallow pink. I remembered learning about hydrangeas and soil – that their colour depends on the acid or alkaline of the earth they grow in. I recall a distant memory of a school science lesson and the acid-alkaline scale, the colours of each segment meeting in the middle green of neutrality. Red at zero, purple at fourteen. My home with a ring of fire, yours with a moat. I always thought it was unfair that you could have no control over the colour they would turn once you’d planted them. I never considered until now that there may be some beauty in that powerlessness.

Dorothy, I must admit, I picked some hydrangeas from your bushes. I pressed them in the pages of the visitor’s guide and carried them with me for the rest of the day (I have now transported them into the back of this diary); like some sort of talisman of belonging, some kind of tangible reminder that I had really been at your home, in your gardens. Sitting on a bench overlooking Rydal Lake, I tenderly tucked them in, making sure they weren’t going to fall out of my booklet. 

Cloaked in the scent of the gardens, hydrangeas tingling in my pocket, and feeling less of a stranger to the home and its grounds, it was time to enter the house. I stepped through the canopied entrance on a weathered tiled porch, feeling goosebumps of an invisible threshold (or, a draught). In the entryway the walls were smooth and littered with framed drawings, paintings, and photographs. Immediately on the right was the dining room, quaint and charming, a table sat in the centre surrounded on all sides with beautiful chairs – signs saying that you and Mary upholstered them, and suddenly all possibilities of your touch and presence in the gardens were instantly silly acts of imagination when confronted with a physical object of your creation. I lightly touched the back of the chairs, thinking your fingers had once touched them, too. Maybe even leaving a splinter, a stubborn stalk that you never fully removed, that you nibbled on in moments alone. Your embroidery was on the wall, another work of nimble fingers, though unfinished. I wonder if you had the same urges as me to start a project and leave it to start another, or if you had the same lethal combination of perfectionism and procrastination – one never allowing you to finish, and the other never allowing you to start.

Outside the dining room sat a large glass cabinet filled with various family objects, several of which were your belongings, including: a pair of the smallest women’s shoes I think I have ever seen (strangely pointy, too), a hairclip (beautiful, but I doubt used often, due to its pristine condition, your unruliness, and also later, your shaved head) and gloves (which I imagine might have kept your fingers warm while writing in the winter months, a cushion for your carelessly scribbled words, or your brother’s poetic dictation). Then, the stairs, curling up from the middle of the hall along the wall and onto a landing, a narrow corridor to the left leading to your bedroom. Modest, rafters, wood and plaster, a small bed, not much room to toss and to turn as I do in the night. Above your bed there was a triptych of photos: you, Mary, and Dora. An odd choice, I thought, though maybe the trinity of femininity in the family. Next to the bed, a small table, and on it a book – ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth’ – a rare find, a book about you. Though poetic, I can’t help but think the title is maybe a little pretentious, and a little unlike you. You were a woman of wonderful words but not one striving for poetry. That was more your brother’s expertise. Though, undoubtedly you helped greatly in his own writing, but I can’t help feel that poetry limited you somehow. I feel your resistance against formula, against tradition. You paved your own paths and perhaps poetry was a path too often trodden. And thinking of paths often trodden, I stood at your bedroom window, gently tracing the indents in the wall, the glass pane and its cracking corners looking out on the view you would have looked out at everyday you were here. I wonder how different it might have looked two hundred years ago. I decide, not that different, as how much can the sky change? 

Back down the stairs the final room was the living room, sort of two rooms really, curving around the corner of the house. Spacious, energetic, charismatic, well-lit, and best of all, with your portrait on the wall. An image I had stared at on my laptop, actually there in front of me. Your eyes even more mischievous in person. I tried to take a photo, as if I didn’t have enough variants of it already, in digital and postcard form. However, I found no matter what angle I took the photo from, distance, or position I was standing in, I couldn’t capture the portrait without also capturing myself reflected in the glass. 

Next to the large painting was another portrait of you I hadn’t seen before, of you as a young woman. A summary under the portrait referenced Thomas de Quincey, a family friend of yours, and his description of your ‘wild eyes and impulsive nature’ – I felt affirmed by the similar observation to the one I had thought myself. Across the room, in front of tall, wide windows, I finally found a trace of credit given to you and your writing. Pages from your diaries were featured on a desk next to poems of William’s, showing which entries you had written that had inspired his poetry, or occurred on the same days. Copies lay in print, with one scanned image from the journal pages themselves, and I drew in closer to interrogate your handwriting. Incredibly messy. How anyone ever deciphered all of your journal is a miracle, and must have taken forever. It is touching though, to see the actual script, the messiness of ink-smudges or scribbled-out words. It is human. Intimate. 

I left the house, and told my family I would just be a minute in the gift shop, where I sought out the book I had seen on your bedside table, which I bought and stowed away in the footbed of the car. I realised suddenly that I would be going back in time in the route I had planned, that Rydal was not your first home, but your last. However, I quickly convinced myself it would be a retracing of your steps, an unfolding of your life. Next was Dove Cottage – your first true home.

Dove Cottage 

July 2024

Dear Dorothy, 

I had to double-take, if not for the plaque I might have missed it – Dove Cottage, Home to the Wordsworth’s. It’s a beautiful building but it possesses an eerie atmosphere. I looked at the windows and an involuntary chill passed over me, the feeling of being watched, as if the window held an invisible onlooker, or a crouching figure inside giggling beneath the windowsill. Perhaps it was the excitement of finding another location so dear to you, perhaps it was the breeze on my sweaty arms from an hour of strenuous walking, perhaps you were waiting to welcome me…

My family and I collapsed on some wobbly garden chairs at a wobbly garden table by the wall to the left of your home. Or, to the right, if you were looking out from the creepy window. Despite my complaining the length of the walk from Rydal to Dove Cottage, I suddenly felt energised – my family felt quite the opposite and decided on cake and hot chocolate. With the arrival of food, a small robin appeared. Curious, inquisitive, it hopped along the stone cobbled wall – most likely knowing with visitors come crumbs. My dad joked that the robin might be the reincarnation of Dorothy come to welcome me to her home. I laughed, but side-eyed the robin. At this moment, a second robin arrived, from the bushes behind the wall, as if it had flown over from the cottage itself. ‘Oh, look, there’s William too!’ I retorted, as Dorothy, through all my research I’ve been disappointed in your entwinement with William, as if you could not exist without him. You obviously loved him very much, as much as you ever loved anyone, but to think that even in death this faux reincarnation of you as robin could not exist without him as a partner was a cruel irony. I amended my comment, ‘Or maybe it is Dora, her niece, or maybe even her dear Mary’… my family replied with hums, but in my heart I reluctantly knew if you were to be a reincarnated robin with a partner for a shadow, it would be William. 

While my family sat recuperating, I decided to go investigate by myself, to seek you out on my own. I started with an ascent to the top of the visitor centre which overlooked a stunning view of Grasmere, a panoramic mountain enclosure, which left me feeling rather insignificant and existential. Eventually, I found the pathway up to the cottage. I had to meander a maze-like route to a barn-like room, all wood and eaves, with shapeless benches facing a large out of place screen. I caught the video saying something about William, rolled my eyes, and decided to continue to explore on my own. Walking out the room, I realised I was at the side of the house and the unsettling window was above me. There was a very small wooden door below the window, hidden under creeping plants’ shadows. I took a moment to imagine you walking in through this door, thinking you must have been quite short, remembering your small shoes from Rydal. Lingering for another moment I wasn’t sure if it was the way in, or if I was even allowed to touch it, but I gave the door a little push, and then embarrassingly realised a family were standing on the road in front of the gate with concerned expressions watching me prodding at the house. I smiled at them sheepishly then scampered out of view of the road and up the dirt path that led straight into the gardens, or left, around the house. Feeling I had already reached my limit of garden-wandering for the day, I chose the left turn, trying to peek in through windows and imagining you returning from a garden walk, admiring your house, smelling soup or baked bread wafting from within. 

I soon reached the back of the house, a house that was a little bit wonky, sort of leaning to the side, an off-white colour with dark wooden details and lattice windows, sunken into the ground giving the impression that it was quite short. I felt less comfortable than I had been at Rydal, maybe because of the tourist-y-ness of it all. I didn’t want to be told about you; I wanted to discover you myself. I stumbled upon an open back door, but as I went to step in a group of people came to step out, and I shuffled back to let them through. Once they had passed, I tried again, but this time was greeted by a tour guide telling me I’d have to wait for the next tour, which would meet in the side-room with the screen in the next twenty minutes. I smiled through gritted teeth and thanked her – my goodness Dorothy, I just wanted to look in the house, for just a minute or two! Rydal may have looked like a castle, but this place was truly fortified. Out of stubbornness I decided not to go wait for the tour, and I instead lingered at the back door pretending to read a laminated sheet about the gardens. Pretending turned momentarily into actuality, as I noticed a quote from you—

I intend to be a great gardener

Written to your friend Jane in a 1788 letter. The paper went on to say that you had rejected the ‘exoticism’ of gardening trends at the time of living in Dove Cottage, and instead chose to source local plants and wildflowers, collecting their seeds or even digging them up in entirety and replanting them here. The paper scolds, ‘not a practise allowed today’ and I snort a little, a bad influence even in death, Dorothy. The paper then contradicts, you were not entirely averse to exotic plants, listing daylilies, sunflowers, London-pride and old-fashioned roses. Your hydrangeas tingled in my pocket. 

I looked up from my faux-reading-turned-thinking to at least get one glance at the house’s interior. It was dark and cosy inside and surprisingly small with low ceilings and narrow corridors. I could see two rooms on the left, a short but steep flight of stairs on the right, and then I overheard a tour guide talking about you to the remaining members of the previous group. About your role in William’s poetry. The person asking questions suggested you may have been bitter at William’s fame, and the tour guide, either optimistic for their sake or in genuine belief, said she felt you would have viewed William’s success as partly your own anyway and that would have been enough for you. I huffed to myself. It is maybe true, but not my personal solution to a question of women’s credit. The tour guide suddenly appeared from a room on the left, and as she came to the door to leave the house she saw me awkwardly standing there and I pretended once again to be reading the laminated sheet, acting surprised at her emergence from the door I had been previously peeking in. After some shuffling and muttered greetings, I had a sudden burst of confidence and said I had overhead her conversation and that I was actually doing a project on you. She was intrigued, and asked a few questions, but as I was attempting to answer what exactly it was I was doing I realised it was quite embarrassing to describe that I had become obsessed with you and that I was reading your journals and writing in my diary to you, so I offered some half-formed truths about research, writing and biography and scurried off. 

I looped back round to the small museum collection room, and I found hidden, in a few nooks around the room, cabinets with some of your belongings. My first discovery was a collection of your commonplace books. Many of the pages they lay open on were much neater than the scribbled mess of the copied journal page featured in Rydal, though your handwriting was still pretty illegible to me, except for in ‘Grasmere – a Fragment’ where I found I could decipher two paragraphs. The first, 

A stranger, Grasmere, in thy Vale

All faces then to me unknown, 

I left my sole companion-friend

To wander out alone.

And, the last, 

My youthful wishes all fulfill’d

Wishes matured by thoughtful choice,

I stood an Inmate of this Vale,

How could I but rejoice?

I was fascinated by the character in the script, the emphasis of ‘Inmate’ capitalised and doubly underlined. I thought it an odd choice. As if you were trapped. But I think you likely meant that the beauty of the Vale rendered you a prisoner, this was your home, not by choice, but wonderfully so. I suppose, as I am an inmate to your journals. And I was struck that you had once felt a stranger here, and felt a little less lonely knowing so. I wondered who the companion-friend was, maybe Jane Pollard who you left to move in with William, or maybe William left behind on an outing. I hoped it was the latter, to prove that you weren’t entirely dependent on his presence. I felt closer to you, myself a lone wanderer of both Rydal Mount and Dove Cottage, the Vale of Grasmere as equally unknown to me but as equally brimming with discoverable promise. Exactly – how could I but rejoice?

Then, the wedding ring. The one you wore on your very own finger, before the wedding. Not your wedding, you never married, but your brother’s. The ring you wore to sleep. I imagine in the night your hand under your chin, the ring catching on your skin. The ring a symbol of a marriage you would never have, too far committed to the family and the life that had resurrected you from grief and from loneliness, who would leave that behind? And if wearing that ring meant for one night you felt a sense of unreachable union, so be it.   

I gave him the wedding ring – with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before – he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently

I resent the ring and what the ring means. So many have taken this extract as a chance to spin an incestuous tale of your love. My first thought was instead of Mary, who had been your friend first, the both of you at school together in Penrith, your Dear Mary and the complexity of two of the people you love most loving one another. And you in the middle. I recently read that one evening before the wedding, you wrote a list with three names: Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Mary Wordsworth. And then, later that evening, another list: Mary Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth. You in the middle. Anyone that truly wants to know you Dorothy, knows you were devoted. To William the most, yes, but to so many others too. To the gardens, to nature, to the poor, to the lake, to flowers, to your journal – you yourself expressed,

My only merits are my devotedness to those I love and I hope charity towards all mankind

At last, I find your journal. It is a book which opens like a flip phone. You wrote in portrait, not landscape. There is a metal clasp, maybe brass, from which it is propped open in the display case. The item’s description says, ‘Imagine Dorothy in Dove Cottage garden, writing in this brown leather-bound journal’ and I internally respond, for weeks I have been thinking of nothing else.