Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. 2 (of 2)

Dorothy Wordsworth kept journals so acutely observed they directly inspired her brother's greatest poetry. Yet her own voice has remained in shadow - until now. This volume captures her account of a Scottish tour undertaken with William and their friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early 1800s, revealing a writer of startling immediacy. She writes of rain sweeping across moors, of conversations with shepherds, of the particular quality of light falling on Highland lochs. These are not mere travel logs but acts of attention - a woman training her senses on the world, finding in landscape what the Romantics would later call the sublime. Reading her is to see the Romantic poets not as monuments but as living people: argumentative, exhausted, exhilarated, wandering through a country that was itself a kind of poem.