These two journals provide a unique picture of daily life with Wordsworth, his friendship with Coleridge, and the composition of his poems. They also offer wonderfully vivid descriptions of the landscape and people of Grasmere and Alfoxden in Somerset, which inspired Wordsworth and have enchanted generations of readers. This edition includes full explanatory notes on the people and places Dorothy writes about.

Dorothy Wordsworth's The Grasmere Journals, begun in May 1800 while at Dove Cottage, and continued for nearly three years until January 1803, is perhaps the best-loved of all journals. Noting the walks and the weather, the friends, country neighbors and beggars on the roads, William Wordsworth's marriage, the composition of poetry, and their concern for Coleridge, her words bring those first years to vivid and intimate life. This edition has been prepared directly from the manuscripts with undeciphered words clarified, first thoughts, later insertions and deletions indicated, and Dorothy's hasty punctuation largely restored. It also offers rich explanatory notes, containing much new detail on friends and family, the scarcely-known people of the Grasmere valley, the books that were read, and the connections with William Wordsworth's poetry.

The first book to focus on Dorothy Wordsworth’s later life and work and the impact of her disability – allowing her to step out from her brother’s shadow and back into her own life story. Dorothy Wordsworth is well known as the author of the Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals (1798–1803) and as the sister of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. She is widely praised for her nature writing and is often remembered as a woman of great physical vitality. Less well known, however, is that Dorothy became seriously ill in 1829 and was mostly housebound for the last twenty years of her life. Her personal letters and unpublished journals from this time paint a portrait of a compassionate and creative woman who made her sickroom into a garden for herself and her pet robin and who finally grew to call herself a poet. They also reveal how vital Dorothy was to her brother’s success, and the closeness they shared as siblings. By re-examining her life through the perspective of her illness, this biography allows Dorothy Wordsworth to step out from her brother’s shadow and back into her own life story.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth is the first literary biography of the Wordsworths' creative collaboration. Using poems, letters, journals, memoirs, and biographies, it plots the intertwined lives of the Wordsworth siblings and their writing.

The Companion to Romanticism is a major introductory survey from an international galaxy of scholars writing new pieces, specifically for a student readership, under the editorship of Duncan Wu.

What did it mean to write as a woman in the Romantic era? How did women writers test and refashion the claims or the grand self, the central 'I, ' we typically see in Romanticism? In this powerful and original study Meena Alexander examines the work of three women: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) the radical feminist who typically thought of life as 'warfare' and revolted against the social condition of women; Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) who lived a private life enclosed by the bonds of femininity, under the protection of her poet brother William and his family; Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter that Wollstonecraft died giving birth to, mistress then wife of the poet Percy Shelley, and precocious author of Frankenstein. Contents: Introduction: Mapping a Female Romanticism; Romantic Feminine; True Appearances; Of Mothers and Mamas; Writing in Fragments; Natural Enclosures; Unnatural Creation; Revising the Feminine; Versions of the Sublime R