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 Her personal letters and unpublished journals from this time paint a portrait of a compassionate and creative woman who made her sickroom into a garden for herself and her pet robin and who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.

Ruthless and visionary, Cecil Rhodes today personifies all the most extreme characteristics of the Victorian Empire-builder. Leaving both a country and a world-famous system of scholarships to commemorate his name, he might have been regarded as proof against personal intrigue. Particularly of the female variety since, in the jargon of the day, he was a confirmed woman-hater. But when he died, many people said his death had been caused by a woman, the notorious Princess Radziwill. What was the hold this determined Polish adventuress had over him? With a passion for cloak-and-dagger intrigue which had already cost her her place in Russian society, the Princess pursued Rhodes from London to Cape Town. There she forced herself on him so relentlessly that Rhodes was said to get on a horse and gallop away whenever she approached his front door. This well-documented double biography contains much material never published be-fore. It clearly establishes that Catherine's power over Rhodes was political, not sexual. Once she realised that Rhodes's few private emotions were fully satisfied by the group of hefty young men who surrounded him at home, the Princess changed her tune. Social importunity having failed, she first demanded money, then began forging Rhodes's name on promissory notes and finally -- as Brian Roberts is the first biographer to have established -- resorted to blackmail. Rhodes's plan to silence her involved Lord Milner and other highly placed men at the Cape. Evidently she had in her possession documents that were political dynamite; they might, the author believes, have ruined Rhodes and deeply implicated Joseph Chamberlain in the Jameson Raid. After legal proceedings which make ludicrous reading today, the Princess ended with a two-year sentence in a Cape Town prison. But the scandal and strain of the Radziwill affair were too much for Rhodes; tragically he died before the case was over. His evil genius -- a figure extraordinarily compounded of melodrama and farce -- survived him by forty years, her secrets still her own.

The sister of the poet records the daily account of their life which becomes also a reference to the poems of Wordsworth and relates these poems to specific entries.