Anyone who has had dealings with the Lake Poets under duress, as set examination texts, will find Sue le Blond’s imaginative exploration of their lives, refreshing, and entertaining.

The Bradford on Avon author certainly reinforces my opinion of William Wordsworth as greatly over-rated.

Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his wife Sarah, her sister Edith and brother-in-law Robert Southey are the main players.

Also in the mix are the Hutchinson sisters, farmer’s daughters Mary and Sara, and Wordsworth’s younger brother John, a merchant seaman.

And many others on the literary scene in the 18th century pop up from time to time.

There is romance, domestic strife, literary rivalry, all told with gritty reality and tongue-in cheek humour.

It is an illuminating picture of the times, chiefly seen through Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and from the perspective of Sarah Coleridge, the outsider, not a poet but married to one of the most brilliant and volatile poets of his age.

Coleridge was an opium addict and Ms le Blond’s book which is part novel, part documentary, chronicles his wife’s efforts to cure him of his addiction and keep him working, pragmatically to earn a living to keep his ever growing family, and to realise his potential as a poet.

They move from London to the Lake District at the behest of the Wordsworths and Sarah hates it. Through Ms le Blond’s prose we can feel the damp and mud of the Lake District at its worst and the occasional glimpse of it at its glorious best.

According to Ms le Blond’s researches STC, as his friends called him, was constantly undermined by Wordsworth who believed himself a superior poet and the font of all theses on the nature of poetry itself. Unfortunately STC so worshipped Wordsworth self-image that he allowed his confidence to be diminished.

The Wordsworths’, in particular Dorothy’s low opinion of the practical Sarah, also rubbed off on STC who pursued a fantasy romance with Sara Hutchinson.

The dialogue is imagined but utterly plausible. Dorothy, whose relationship with her brother was unhealthily claustrophic and exclusive, comes across as a naïve, prudish and blinkered woman. Occasionally we are almost sorry for her - such as when her brother marries Mary Hutchinson, and her position in the household is somewhat ambivalent - but not for long.

It is a very perspicacious, human and humorous tale, with a nod to Sue Limb’s spoof radio series The Wordsmiths of Gorsemere, but nevertheless a serious portrait of poets and their time.

The jacket, illustrating Striding Edge, is also by Sue le Blond.

The book, published by You Writeon Publishing, is on sale at £7,99 or £6.99 at Ex Libris books in Bradford on Avon where you can also by her previous book on a similar topic, Down to a Sunless Sea, for the same price.