num_pages: 304
description: The night before the marriage of her brother William Wordsworth to their childhood friend, Dorothy Wordsworth wore his wedding ring upon her finger; too distraught to attend the ceremony, she collapsed utterly when it was done. She would never recover, changing over time from what Thomas de Quincey described as "the very wildest person I have ever known" to a recluse.But this handmaiden to her brother and his close friend Coleridge was herself a writer of spectacular originality. Both men borrowed her imagery—hammered out on their epic walks across the English countryside—for the best of their work. Her words survive intact in the Grasmere Journals, which record the Wordsworths’ life of severe asceticism mixed with an ecstatic communion with nature. In this inspired close reading of the journals, Frances Wilson reconstructs the rich and strange emotional life of a woman too often dismissed as a self-effacing saint. It is a feat of imaginative biography.
language: English
title: The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth
publisher: Faber  Faber