Poetry She Wrote

Everyone knows William Wordsworth, but what of his younger sister, Dorothy? This is presumably the question Kathleen Winter asked herself before she began work on her latest novel, Undersong. Dorothy Wordsworth is a mysterious figure. An author, diarist, and poet in her own right, she never married and lived with her brother and his wife. Winter’s rendition is not as blunt as Virginia Woolf’s portrait of the fictional Judith Shakespeare in A Room of One’s Own — a woman as brilliant as her brother but “not sent to school,” who is shamed and bullied before she takes her own life after an unwanted pregnancy. But Undersong does aim to make up for the unjust neglect of this later (and real) sister.

Dorothy is depicted primarily through others, in particular by the household’s handyman of four decades, James Dixon, who dotingly calls her Rotha, and, more unusually, by a solemn old tree that stands in the Wordsworths’ garden. According to Sycamore...