Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth is best known for being the sister of poet and literary critic William Wordsworth, and for having written journal entries that clearly provided inspiration and material for her more famous brother’s poems. In recent decades, however, she has undergone a reassessment and has emerged as a highly skilled diarist, poet, and naturalist whose creative output deserves acclaim and careful study in its own right. The loss of her mother and father at an early age caused her to be separated from her siblings; when she was reunited with her brother William Wordsworth the emotional connection between them was strong and was to endure throughout their lives. Her record of their shared life is important not only for what it reveals about the Romantic circle (including Samuel Taylor Coleridge) to which she belonged, nor simply for the raw material it provided for her brother William’s poetry, but as a form of art worthy of study in itself. Her own poetry, as well, shows a philosophical depth that is generally undervalued. Promisingly, recent decades have seen exciting developments in Dorothy Wordsworth studies, particularly in relation to women’s life writing, illness narratives, and disability studies, aided by the long-overdue publication of the Rydal journals.