Mallaby, George. “Dorothy Wordsworth: The Perfect Sister.” The Atlantic 186.6 (December 1950): 81–83.
“We, who are alive, hardly know when we are happy. We are always looking ahead, thinking, or at least hoping, that ‘the best is yet to be.’ When we ponder and judge the lives of dead men, we say to ourselves, taking credit for the acuteness of our intellectual perception, ‘That was the climax of their happiness; in those years they lived to the full.’ There are no three persons, at least in the history of literature, about whom it is easier thus to express ourselves, than about Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister Dorothy. Even in their own lifetimes they knew that from 1797 to 1802 they shared a lustrum of sympathy and love and achievement which were proof against worldly accidents and tribulations. In that golden period these three persons were an undivided and indivisible trinity. When the triune spell was broken each of them failed – Coleridge fell into a self-deceiving idleness, morbid imaginings of jealousy and mistrust, an opiate confusion of mind and heart; Wordsworth, arming himself with the shield of a rather self-righteous duty, moved boldly but remorsefully away from ‘the vision splendid’; Dorothy, overburdened with household cares and perplexed with spiritual disappointments and dismay, surrendered to a senseless melancholy” (p. 81).
Text: Web.
Dorothy Wordsworth 