Dora Wordsworth

{{short description|Daughter of William Wordsworth}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=May 2022}}

{{Use British English|date=June 2012}}

{{Infobox person

| name = Dora Wordsworth

| birth_name = Dorothy Wordsworth

| birth_date = {{birth date|1804|8|16|df=y}}

| death_date = {{death date and age|1847|7|9|1804|8|16|df=y}}

| resting_place = St Oswald's Church, Grasmere, Cumbria, England

| parents = William Wordsworth
Mary Hutchinson

| spouse = Edward Quillinan (1843–1847; her death)

}}

Dorothy "Dora" Wordsworth{{cite web|website=England, Births and Christenings, 1538–1975, index, FamilySearch|access-date=23 August 2012|url=https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/NR9X-1X5|title=Dorothy Wordsworth, 16 Sep 1804|format=citing reference, FHL microfilm 97368}} (16 August 1804 – 9 July 1847) was the daughter of poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and his wife Mary Hutchinson. Her infancy inspired William Wordsworth to write "Address to My Infant Daughter"{{Cite web|url=https://www.bartleby.com/145/ww265.html|title=Address to my infant daughter, Dora|last=Wordsworth|first=William|author-link=William Wordsworth|website=Bartleby.com|access-date=2020-04-21}} in her honour. As an adult, she was further immortalised by him in the 1828 poem "The Triad",{{Cite web|url=http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap//romtext/articles/rt15_n03.html|title=The Perfect Match: Wordsworth's 'The Triad' and Coleridge's 'Garden of Boccacio' in Context|last=Furr|first=Derek|date=2005|website=Cardiff University|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060501125918/http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap//romtext/articles/rt15_n03.html|archive-date=1 May 2006}} along with Edith Southey{{cite web|last=Jones|first=Katherine|url=http://www.kathleenjones.co.uk/books/sisterhd.html|title=Introduction to the Passionate Sisterhood}} and Sara Coleridge, daughters of her father's fellow Lake Poets. In 1843, at the age of 39, Dora Wordsworth married Edward Quillinan. While her father initially opposed the marriage, the "temperate but persistent pressure" exerted by Isabella Fenwick, a close family friend, convinced him to relent.{{Cite book|last=Taylor|first=Henry|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gxdHAAAAYAAJ&q=autobiography+of+henry+taylor|title=The Autobiography of Henry Taylor, Volume 1|publisher=Longmans, Green and Co.|year=1885|location=London|pages=337}}

Throughout her life, Wordsworth formed intense romantic attachments to both men and women, the most significant being her friendship with Maria Jane Jewsbury. Another close friend was Maria Kinnaird, adoptive daughter of Richard "Conversation" Sharp and the future wife of Thomas Drummond. Wordsworth and Kinnaird were friends from their teenage years and some of their correspondence has survived.MS University Library, Davis, California.
also, reproduced with permission in {{cite book|last=Knapman|first=David|title=Conversation Sharp: The Biography of a London Gentleman, Richard Sharp (1759–1835), in Letters, Prose and Verse|publisher=Dorset Press|year=2003|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1E8oywAACAAJ|type=Available at British Library}}

Described by her aunt and namesake Dorothy Wordsworth as "at times very beautiful",{{cite book|section=Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Marshall, letter dated 19 December 1809|title=The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth|editor=Ernest de Selincourt|type=2 parts. Part 1: The Middle Years, 1806–1811. Revised by Mary Moorman. Part 2: The Middle Years, 1812–1820. Revised by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill.}} Dora Wordsworth was devoted to her father and a significant influence on his poetry. Their relationship was particularly close, with Coleridge's son Hartley describing how she "almost adored" him in an 1830 letter.{{cite book|author=Hartley Coleridge|title=Letters|page=112|date=30 August 1830}}

However, Wordsworth also had literary abilities of her own, publishing a travel journal. Sara Coleridge complained after Wordsworth's death that her father's demands on her "frustrated a real talent".{{cite book|section=Introduction to Letters of Dora Wordsworth|page=11|title=Journal of a Few Months' Residence in Portugal, and Glimpses of the South of Spain, 2 vols|location=London|publisher=Edward Moxon|year=1847}}

Wordsworth died of tuberculosis at her parents' home, and is buried in the graveyard of St Oswald's Church, Grasmere, Cumbria, along with her parents and siblings, aunt Sarah Hutchinson, and Hartley Coleridge, son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.{{cite web|url=http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/wordsworth.htm|title=Poets' Graves, William Wordsworth|access-date=4 November 2020}} After her death, her distraught father (who had already lost two of his children to illness), planted hundreds of daffodils in her memory in a field (later named Dora's Field) beside St. Mary's Church, Rydal.{{cite web|url=http://www.visitcumbria.com/amb/cha4.htm|title=St Mary's Church, Rydal|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080509095248/http://www.visitcumbria.com/amb/cha4.htm |archive-date=9 May 2008 }} The site of Dora's Field, where daffodils are still cultivated today, is now owned by the National Trust.{{cite web|url=http://www.visitcumbria.com/amb/dorasfld.htm|title=Dora's Field with picture|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080510160046/http://www.visitcumbria.com/amb/dorasfld.htm|archive-date=10 May 2008 }}