POET William Wordsworth was a lucky man, with a seemingly endless supply of love and encouragement from sister Dorothy, wife Mary and daughter Dora - the women behind his words.

To celebrate and explore their role as homemakers and "an industrious force of pen and paper quite unlike any other", the Wordsworth Trust at Grasmere has put together a year-long project called Women Behind the Words.

The opening event is the Women's Lives Through Letters (until March 18) which reveals how correspondence offered companionship in Dora, Mary and Dorothy's otherwise isolated lives.

The importance of letters is shown keenly by Sara Coleridge's hand-written scolding of Dora back in 1818 for not having written. It opens: "Vilo Doro! Your base neglect of me is intolerable, and I can endure it no longer, but no! I will not waste ink and paper in vain upbraidings..."

As the year goes on, Women Behind the Words will continue with Dorothy Wordsworth, A Stitch in her Time (March 24-April 29); In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl who wrote Frankenstein (May 5-August 27); and 'This Girl Did’: Dorothy Wordsworth & Women Mountaineers (September 1-December 23).

Explaining the thinking behind the project, assistant curator Melissa Mitchell said: "When studying the manuscript drafts of Wordsworth’s poetry today, we often see the words from his mind shaped on paper in Dorothy, Mary or Dora’s hand. It is hard not to wonder just how far their involvement extended: did they ever suggest another word, rephrasing of a line, movement of a stanza?

"It is also possible to consider how the home they built, the world they created and, most importantly, their own personalities, emotions and actions shaped the words on the page. How might things have been different if these women were not in Wordsworth’s life?

"By exploring their own manuscript journals and letters, their own words will help to build a picture of what their lives were like, and how they individually and collectively created the world in which the poems were written."