Daughter of a family of Yorkshire farmers, she was the younger sister of Mary Wordsworth. Coleridge fell in love with her in winter 1799 during his first visit to the north of England and the Lakes. Over the next decade, their relationship caused great distress to them and their respective families. Practical and eminently capable, Sara, who never married, spent a great deal of time with the Wordsworths and their children. She also became a very close friend of the Southey family, providing invaluable assistance after the death of Herbert Southey in 1816 and also in the mid-1830s during Edith Southey’s confinement in The Retreat, York.