Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey have become such a literary myth that we are used to looking at the Lake District solely through their eyes. But the story for the women who loved and surrounded them - Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth, Sarah Coleridge and their daughters - was very different. Based on necessity, the extended family-type group they formed was a far cry from the harmonious rustic idyll illustrated by their male counterparts. Kathleen Jones looks at their letters and journals in this illuminating account of their lives - the passionate attachments and jealousies, unwanted pregnancies and children's death, drug addiction and barbaric medical practices.