In this group biography of the women who featured in the lives of the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, Kathleen Jones takes us into the kitchens, sickrooms, and eventually the madwoman's attics of these major Romantic households. The image of the familiar rustic idyll of Romantic poetry depends upon the bracing way these women bore the brunt of domestic realities. Their letters and journals form the basis for an illuminating new account of their interconnected lives--their passionate attachments, jealousies, the deaths of children, the realities of chronic ill health--at the same time contributing to our understanding of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey as all-too-fallible human beings.

Kathleen Jones is the author of Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Learning Not to be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti.

“[R]eading [A Passionate Sisterhood] becomes a gripping, almost addictive experience . . .” —Times Literary Supplement

“It is the stuff that your English teacher never told you.” —Daily Mail

“This is a fascinating, marvellous, utterly absorbing book.” —The Independent (London)

“This elegantly written book stands by itself.” —NWSA Journal