Author Description

Gittings and Manton offer the first biography of Dorothy Wordsworth that treats her as a person in her own right, rather than as an adjunct to her brother or to Coleridge. Her devotion to family and friends is well known, but she was also a woman of problems and contradictions often connected with the changing social and political climate of her time. From the authors' examination of her uncertain health and the nature of her final breakdown, she emerges as more strange and wayward than convention has portrayed.