A stunning historical novel of rare enigmatic power reimagining the so-called "lost years" of the misunderstood Romantic Era genius Dorothy Wordsworth. When young James Dixon, recently returned from the battle of Waterloo and local jack-of-all-trades, meets Dorothy Wordsworth in Rydel, Westmoreland, in 1816, he realizes he's never met a woman remotely like her. In her early thirties, Dorothy has already lived an extraordinary life, one that has flown in the face of social convention. As her brother William Wordsworth's closest confidante and creative collaborator--considered by some in their circle to be the secret to his artistic success--she has forsworn marriage and carved a seemingly idyllic life for herself, with William and his wife, in England's Lake District, where she passes the days taking long walks and filling her diaries with astonishing observations of the natural world and common country life--and of course, helping William usher in a new epoch in English literature. When Dixon is approached by William to do some handiwork around their humble estate at Rydel Mount, he quickly understands that his unofficial responsibility is to keep an eye on Dorothy, who is growing frail, melancholic, and inscrutable. The pair form an unusual bond, and over the next several decades, Dixon is ushered into the Wordsworth inner sanctum--where he is swept up in the extraordinary secrets of this extraordinary family and their unusual circle (Samuel Coleridge, Thomas de Quincy, and Charles and Mary Lamb all make cameos). In the imagination of bestselling author Kathleen Winter, the misunderstood genius of Dorothy Wordsworth and complexity of her legacy is given new meaning. Through James Dixon, a tremendous literary invention, Winter leads us inside the Wordsworth family and the scintillating emotional and artistic life, hidden traumas, private betrayals and triumphs of an inimitable, unorthodox woman determined to exist on her own terms. But also, brilliantly, Winter weaves a complex dark undersong through her story, not only of Dorothy's secret life and thoughts, but that of the tragically unacknowledged lives of women in her time, such as Dixon's own doomed sister.

Unabridged.