Author Description

Wordsworth's "exquisite sister", as Coleridge described her, was not only the cherished companion of the two poets, but also a writer who possessed a geniune poetic imagination in her own right. The journals she kept at Alfoxden, in 1798, where her brother and Coleridge were composing the Lyrical Ballads and at Grasmere from 1800 to 1803, when she and Wordsworth were living at Dove Cottage are printed here for the first time as Dorothy wrote them. Two of Dorothy's poems are included in the appendix, along with thirty-three poems by Wordsworth, which are referred to in the journals.