Includes index.

"Dorothy Wordsworth started her Grasmere Journal when she was twenty-eight. It covers the years 1800 to 1803, when she and her brother were living at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, Westmorland. It was a simple, even a hard life, but one filled with an intense rapture which radiates from Dorothy's unselfconscious pages as it does from the magnificent poems William was writing at the same time. Though Dorothy said that "I should detest the idea of setting myself up as an author", her Journal is written with breathtaking clarity and tenderness. Her lively record of the trivial details of daily life is interspersed with lyrical descriptions of nature and shrewdly sympathetic accounts of country neighbours and wandering beggars. To Coleridge, Dorothy was Wordsworth's "exquisite sister... her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature - and her taste a perfect electrometer". Her Journal is filled with a reverence for nature which recalls, and sometimes inspired, her brother's best poems. The beauty of the Lakeland landscape made her "more than half a poet" herself. This new edition of the Grasmere Journal, published in association with the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, is lavishly illustrated with contemporary watercolours, sketches and engravings which ecoke for the modern reader the enchantment of "our own dear Grasmere". --,Dust Jacket.

SACFinal081324