This biography is the first to treat Dorothy Wordsworth as a person in her own right, a woman of problems and contradictions who emerges as more strange and wayward than convention has portrayed.

... In ' Author's Voyage down the Rhine ( Thirty Years Ago ) ' , William writes nostalgically of a landscape glimpsed in passing and never seen again : ' We saw the living Landscapes of the Rhine , Reach after reach , salute us and depart ...