In these days of literary trend-chasing, when every publishing season yields yet another widely acclaimed “Voice of a New Generation,” it seems little short of remarkable that the most influential movement in the history of English literature made its way in a relatively hype-free manner. The first generation of Romantic writers based their operation in the remotest part of England, avoided London literary society, and set their work before the public without unseemly haste or self-promotional fanfare. Most striking of all, perhaps, the movement had as its chief historian and prose artist—and, arguably, as its emotional center—one of the most unassuming and unambitious women ever to correct a set of proofs.

They were not, alas, Dorothy Wordsworth’s own proofs. For, though she did enough writing in her now celebrated journals to occupy several standard nineteenth-century volumes, not a single word of those journals saw print in her lifetime. It was a life devoted not to her own writing but to her brother William, whom she served in a multitude of ways—going over his proofs, copying his poems, sewing his shirts, keeping his house, and helping to raise his five children. To be sure, while he wrote poetry about the hills and dales of the Lake District where they spent most of their lives, about the common people of the neighborhood and the sights they observed on their tours of Scotland and the Continent, she treated the same materials lovingly and meticulously in her own journals. But if William’s