"[The author has] written a succinct yet roomy book, one that moves along with novelistic buoyancy and grace. She gets the facts-to-fancy ratio, always a difficult one for a biographer to weigh, exactly right. She lays out the essentials of Dorothy Wordsworth's life like a well-orchestrated banquet, leaving no doubt that the resonating years 1800–3 are the bravura main course.... Ms. Wilson strides purposefully through Wordsworth's intoxicating life, quibbling when needed with earlier biographers, poking into every bit of tangled brush, triangulating her subject's life through the work of many other writers, some of them contemporary. The range of this biographer's references is wide, and wickedly inclusive. One chapter begins with a quotation from the political-punk band Gang of Four: 'This heaven gives me migraine.' This book, its own kind of heaven, gave me quite the opposite."—NYTimes