As a book dedicated to validating Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge as independent, valuable writers, The Poetics of Relationship contains many excerpts of Dorothy and Hartley’s works. Healy takes a unique approach, evaluating these writers’ relationships with William Wordsworth (Dorothy’s brother) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hartley’s father), emphasizing how they influenced their better-known relatives rather than adopting the more common, opposite perspective. We can understand this book as one of several modern projects aimed at pulling Dorothy Wordsworth out of William’s shadow.