The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

Description

'Genius ... Its own kind of heaven.' - New York Times 'A most beautiful, deep, and humble study of incredibly complex people.' - Oliver Sacks Dorothy Wordsworth has been an enigma for centuries. William's beloved sister was his muse, champion, and most valued reader. She is mythologised as a self-effacing spinster and saintly amanuensis, yet Thomas De Quincey described her as 'all fire and ardour'. Dorothy sacrificed a conventional life to share in her brother's world of words. In her Grasmere Journals, she vividly recorded their intimate life together in the Lake District, marked by a startling freedom from social convention. The tale that unfolds in her brief, electric entries reveals an intense bond between siblings, culminating in Dorothy's collapse on William's wedding day - after which the woman who once strode the hills in all weathers retreated inside the house for the last three decades of her life. In her magisterial biography, Frances Wilson uses the compressed emotion of Dorothy's journals to evoke the rich interior world of a woman determined to live on her own terms - one who deserves her own place in the history of the Romantic movement.

Frances Wilson is a celebrated biographer, critic, and academic. She is the author of five works of non-fiction, including The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; How to Survive the Titanic: Or, the Sinking of J Bruce Ismay (2011), winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography; and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (2016), which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2016 and shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circles Award. Her forthcoming book is Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence.

'Intelligent and intriguing...A portrait of a peculiar, passionate, yet meticulous woman which is hauntingly strange.' - Sunday Telegraph 'Passion is the keynote of Wilson's fine biography...Brims with the personality of [an] extraordinary woman...Thrilling.' - Sunday Times 'This beautiful, wise biography draws Dorothy from her hiding places. She emerges as a passionate figure.' - Daily Telegraph 'Gripping...Bold, witty, scholarly and speculative.' - Margaret Drabble