I stumbled on these via the BBC Books and Authors podcast which is really my favorite book radio show ever because they just talk about the books they like and argue just the tiniest bit with the other people on the show who don’t like them, sharing favorite scenes and language, telling a bit about context, explaining what’s unique. Booktalk. Simple. Let’s not make a critical analysis mess of them

A recent one put me on to Dorothy Wordsworth whom I mistakenly thought was Wordsworth’s wife, but is instead his sister who lived off and on together with their brother John and Wordsworth’s wife Mary Hutchinson in the Lake District in England.

Such lovely evocative journals, so much love. They are landscape portraits and sketchings of their village and the passersby, as well as glimpses into a writing life . She reads Shakespeares plays, brings Wordsworth his breakfast while he’s in the middle of a poem and does the ironing. “The morning clear but cloudy,” she writes, “that is, the hills were not overhung by mists. After dinner Aggy weeded onions and carrots–I helped for a little-wrote to Mary Hutchinson–washed my head—worked. After tea went to Ambleside–a pleasant cool but not too cold evening. Rydale was very beautiful with spear shaped streaks of polished steel. No letters! –only one newspaper. I returned by Clappersgate. Grasemere was very solumn in the last glimpse of twilight it calls home the heart to quiteness.