Dorothy Wordsworth

Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) was an English diarist and the lifelong companion of her brother William Wordsworth. Born in Cockermouth and separated from William after their mother's death, she rejoined him in 1795, and they lived at Racedown, at Alfoxden near Coleridge, and from 1799 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Her journals, never meant for publication, record walks, weather, neighbors and the natural world with exact, vivid attention, and William drew on them for poems such as "I wandered lonely as a cloud." She also wrote Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland. A long illness clouded her last decades.