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The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth
Frances Wilson
A Life
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
February 2009
On Sale: February 17, 2009
336 pages
ISBN: 0374108676
EAN: 9780374108670
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Described by the writer and opium addict Thomas De Quincey
as “the very wildest . . . person I have ever known,”
DorothyWordsworth was neither the self-effacing spinster
nor the sacrificial saint of common telling. A brilliant
stylist in her own right, Dorothy was at the center of the
Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. She was
her brother William Wordsworth’s inspiration, aide, and
most valued reader, and a friend to Coleridge; both
borrowed from her observations of the world for their own
poems.William wrote of her, “She gave me eyes, she gave me
ears.” In order to remain at her brother’s side, Dorothy
sacrificed both marriage and comfort, jealously guarding
their close-knit domesticity—one marked by a startling
freedom from social convention. In the famed Grasmere
Journals, Dorothy kept a record of this idyllic life
together. The tale that unfolds through her brief, electric
entries reveals an intense bond between brother and sister,
culminating in Dorothy’s dramatic collapse on the day of
William’s wedding to their childhood friend Mary
Hutchinson. Dorothy lived out the rest of her years with
her brother and Mary. The woman who strode the hills in all
hours and all weathers would eventually retreat into the
house for the last three decades of her life. In this succinct, arresting biography, Frances Wilson
reveals Dorothy in all her complexity. From the coiled
tension of Dorothy’s journals, she unleashes the rich
emotional life of a woman determined to live on her own
terms, and honors her impact on the key figures of
Romanticism.
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