The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were separated in childhood after their parents died, but developed a very close relationship as adults and spent the rest of their lives together, even after William was married to Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy and William walked the Lake District hills together, her detailed observations of the natural world served as inspiration for his poems (he wrote “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears...”), and she contributed her ideas to the poetic discussions between Wordsworth and Coleridge. Dorothy kept journals—intended not for publication, but solely for William’s eyes—and their publication a century later opened a window on the writing life of a Romantic poet. After reading those journals, British biographer Frances Wilson has written The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (published by Faber in the UK, not yet published in the US), which looks to be a fascinating story of the intertwined lives of a poet and his sister and helpmate.

In The Telegraph, Frances Wilson explained how she came to write the biography, after discovering in the journals a Dorothy very different from the accepted stereotypical “maiden aunt”:
“A demure virgin? Not the Dorothy I know”

And there have been a good number of illuminating reviews of the book in the UK newspapers:

from The Telegraph:
“Wordsworth’s intriguing sister Dorothy,” by Caroline Moore
“This account is actually constructed, with scrupulous care, from Dorothy’s own words (‘I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed, neither hearing nor seeing anything...’). Frances Wilson is meticulously aware of the ‘tantalising economy’ of Dorothy's writings, and how they resist our intrusive sympathies.”

from The Guardian:
“More than her brother’s keeper...,” by Virginia Rounding
“Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth reveals a passionate, talented woman whose love for her brother defined her and finally destroyed her.”

also from The Guardian:
“The agony, the ecstasy and the hot soup,” by Andrew Motion
“a subtle and iconoclastic life of Wordsworth’s brilliant and devoted sister.... By aligning her life with his, and assuming from early womanhood that they would always be together in some kind of menage or other, she discovered freedom and self-validation but also embraced self-denial.”

from The Sunday Times:
“The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth,” by Miranda Seymour
“Dorothy began writing the Grasmere Journals in 1800 ‘because I shall give William pleasure by it.’ William’s pleasure included filching from Dorothy’s pages to create his poetry. The connections are transparent.... Such was their closeness that Wilson suggests Dorothy and William may have been the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff.”

More on William Wordsworth:
Profile of William Wordsworth, seminal British Romantic poet
Library of poems by Wordsworth
Memory and Nature: A Guide to William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
Wordsworth’s Daffodils Spring Up on YouTube