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On Monday, June 2nd, 1800 Dorothy Wordsworth's journal reads:
I sate a long time to watch the hurrying waves and to hear the regularly irregular sound of the dashing waters. The waves round about the little [Island] seemed like a dance of spirits that rose out of the water, round its small circumference of shore. (7)
There is much in this solitary, reflective image that can be transposed to the larger depiction of Wordsworth's life and psyche in her journals.1 Within her personal writings, she is both authence and focal point: continually mesmerized by the nature she adores and worships, Wordsworth gleans from it a spiritual sustenance; so too is she perceived as the stable, yet isolated land surrounded by the waves of her brother's and Coleridge's dashing personalities and poetics. Wordsworth's journals examine the minutiae of circumscribed locales, and it is her attunement to the regular irregularities of domesticity and nature that distinguishes her work. Her articulations of her life flow readily from chores to health problems, to beautifully encapsulated images of people and nature; these latter snapshots are lingered over, and set apart by their clarity and precision - their "literariness" - from the bustle of catalogued daily life. This easy oscillation from the banal to the revelatory and back to the banal again has inspired much critical commentary. Consider the following, from Virginia Woolf's "Dorothy Wordsworth": "Rapt but controlled, free yet strictly ordered, [her] homely narrative moves naturally from ecstasy on the hills to baking bread and ironing linen and fetching William his supper in the cottage" (204). Judy Simons extends WoolPs appreciation: "Dorothy's journal contains not just a catalogue of information, but an interpretive record of experience, together with a revealing psychological portrait of its author" (5). The (dis)organization of Dorothy's writing echoes what David Lodge, in his definition of stream-of-consciousness narrative, identifies as "the continuous flow of thought and sensation in the human mind." Indeed, her attentiveness to her own perceptions arguably constitutes a movement toward the preoccupation with the "the private, subjective consciousness of the individual [self]" which characterizes much of the writing of the early twentieth-century, and the stream-of-consciousness style in particular (Lodge 42).
This assertion necessitates a step backward to view Wordsworth's writing within the larger scope...