start with her appearance. No images of her as a young woman are extant. She was short, we know, and thin. Coleridge said of her, wonderfully: "If you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary--if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty." What's filtered down to us is a certain fiery yet ethereal spirit. In his poem "Tintern Abbey," her brother praised "the shooting lights" of her "wild eyes." Thomas de Quincey saw something of the "gipsy" in her, and called her the "very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have ever known."
from The New York Times: A Brother's Keeper: The Other Wordsworth
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