Dorothy Wordsworth was born on Christmas Day in Cockermouth, in the north of England. When she was six her mother died, and the five children were split up: her brothers stayed together, and she was sent to live with relatives far away. She did not live with her brother William again for nearly twenty years, and she never stopped longing for it.

In 1795 they finally set up house together, first in Dorset and then in Somerset, near Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom they walked the hills almost daily. In 1799 they moved to Dove Cottage, a small whitewashed house in Grasmere, in the Lake District, and Dorothy began keeping the journal for which she is remembered.

The Grasmere journals record ordinary days: baking bread, mending stockings, walking to the post, the weather, who came by, what William was writing, how he slept. But they are written with such clear, fresh attention to the natural world that they read like poetry. She notices the light on the lake, the sound of birds, a beggar woman on the road, the exact way moss grows on a wall. Coleridge said of her that her eye was “watchful in minutest observation of nature.”

On April 15, 1802, walking with William beside Ullswater, she saw a long belt of daffodils along the shore. That night she wrote: “I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind.” Two years later William wrote “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” and its dancing daffodils came straight from her pages.

Dorothy never meant the journals for publication, and they were not published in full until long after her death. In her late fifties she fell seriously ill, and spent her last twenty years an invalid, cared for by the family she had looked after for so long. She died in 1855. She is now read for her own sake, as one of the great observers in English.