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Wordsworth wrote “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" in 1798, when he was 28 years old and traveling in Germany with his sister, the poet Dorothy Wordsworth. This was the same year Wordsworth and his good friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, jointly published Lyrical Ballads, though “She Dwelt” first appeared in the second, 1800 edition of the book. Lyrical Ballads is widely considered to have propelled the English Romantic movement into full flight. Most of its poems were written by Wordsworth; Coleridge contributed four (though to be fair, his most famous, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is pretty long). In Lyrical Ballads, the writers paid tribute to the natural world, describing its effect upon human emotion and sense of self. In his preface to the 1800 edition, Wordsworth describes the poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of feelings” that “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” 1798 was the beginning of Wordsworth’s “great decade,” the term some critics use to refer to what they believe were his years of most valuable productivity. During that same trip to Germany with his sister, Wordsworth would draft the other four poems that appear in the group critics call the “Lucy Poems.” In addition to “She Dwelt,” they are “Strange Fits of Passion I have Known,” “I Travelled among Unknown Men,” “Three Years She Grew,” and “A Slumber Did my Spirit Steal,” all but the last of which mention Lucy by name. Some have proposed that Lucy represented Dorothy, others Wordsworth's muse (or generalized source of inspiration), and others Peggy Hutchinson, a childhood friend who died young and whose sister, Mary, Wordsworth eventually married. Wordsworth, however, never acknowledged the link between the poems, and when asked who Lucy might represent, kept quiet. 1798 was also the publication year of the novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, the unfinished and posthumously published sequel to feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft had been married to the anarchist and writer William Godwin, and died eleven days after giving birth to their child, Mary, the future author of Frankenstein and wife to Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.