Local author and volunteer room guide at Coleridge Cottage, in Nether Stowey, Bethany Askew has published a sequel to her book about the Romantic poet’s time spent living in Somerset.

The first of Bethany’s two historical novels, Three Extraordinary Years, prompted visitors to the cottage to ask what happened next, and so she has written The Two Saras: Coleridge in Cumbria.

The poetry Coleridge write during his three years in Nether Stowey was influenced not only by the humble cottage he lived in and the beautiful Quantock hills, but by his relationships with his wife and the Wordsworths, who moved to Somerset to be near him.

Coleridge’s collaboration with Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads is seen now as the birth of the English Romantic period.

Other visitors to the cottage in Lime Street included literary giants such as Robert Southey, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt.

In July 1800 Coleridge took his family to live in Greta Hall in Cumbria. Here he should have had everything he needed: his wife Sara was pregnant again, the house was spacious enough for him to work in undisturbed and he was living close to the Wordsworths in countryside that he loved.

But there was another Sarah in the north: Sarah Hutchinson. And as his already-shaky marriage began to fall further apart, Coleridge found himself drawn more and more to her and the charmed Wordsworth circle.

This novel, which covers 1800 to 1804, examines the relationship between Coleridge and his wife Sara and Coleridge’s infatuation with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sarah Hutchinson.

Three Extraordinary Years and The Two Saras are available to buy directly from the publishers: www.bluepoppypublishing.co.uk

Bethany Askew is the author of five other novels: The Time Before, The World Within, Out of Step, Counting the Days and Poppy’s Seed. She has also written a short story, The Night of the Storm, and she writes poetry.