Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
After the style of The Professor and the Madman, a dramatic story set against a backdrop of literary history.

Mary Lamb—a dutiful daughter, well liked by just about everyone—killed her own mother with a knife. She spent the rest of her life in and out of madhouses, yet the crime and its aftermath opened up a life that no woman of her time or class could have expected. Free to read extensively, Lamb discovered her talent for writing. She and her brother, the essayist Charles Lamb, embarked on a literary collaboration that resulted in the famous Tales from Shakespeare. Confidante to many of Britain's Romantics including Coleridge, Godwin, and Wordsworth, Mary Lamb stood at the vibrant center of a colorful literary circle. Through a deep reading of history, letters, and literature, Susan Tyler Hitchcock brings to life an intriguing portrait of Lamb and her world. This narrative of a nearly forgotten woman becomes a tapestry of insights into creativity and madness, the changing lives of women, and the redemptive power of the written word. 32 illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

A violent murder gives birth to a literary icon
"Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London" begins with the September 1796 murder of elderly Elizabeth Lamb. Her spinster daughter, Mary, snapped under the strain of caring for her aging parents and aunt, and reacted to a caustic remark by plunging a carving knife deep into Mrs. Lamb's chest. Mary was confined in a private lunatic asylum for several weeks, and spent the rest of her life juggling literary brilliance and debilitating insanity. Her champion was her brother, famous essayist and poet Charles Lamb, with whom she lived until his death in 1834.

Charles and Mary Lamb co-authored a children's book called Tales from Shakespeare, which became a bestseller and remained in print for many years. Together and separately, the Lambs produced children's books, poetry collections, and magazine and newspaper articles. Their success made them central figures in an energetic writers' and artists' circle that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and William Hazlitt.

The book is well-written but the title is somewhat misleading. It's not a work of True Crime per se: "Mad Mary Lamb" is both a biography of the Lamb siblings and a history of early nineteenth England's literary establishment. But Susan Tyler Hitchcock advances the intriguing argument that the act of matricide freed Mary to become a 'woman of letters'. As a mental patient, she experienced few of the expectations or demands that women of her era traditionally dealt with, leaving her free to undertake the unconventional role of female writer. The death of her mother was the birth of her literary career.

Interesting slice of London life, but Lambs' hagiography undeserved
Mad Mary Lamb provides an interesting look at various aspects of British society in late-Georgian London, as well as providing the story of Mary and Charles Lamb, two writers, brother and sister, who were as devoted to each other throughout their adult lives as any two married people.The book is really about both brother and sister, discussing their lives, their relationship and their friends.Both struggled with mental illness.Charles though was much less profoundly affected by it than Mary, whose life eventually became overwhelmed by increasingly frequent psychotic episodes.Mary was 10 years older, and in the grip of her first spasm of mental illness murdered her abusive mother with a kitchen knife.Her work is discussed in brief.In truth it can't be said to be memorable, even though their "Tales from Shakespeare" for children has been in print in many languages for almost 200 years.By avoiding a more substantial discussion of their work the author does manage to avoid interfering with her attempt at hagiography.In their version of "The Merchant of Venice", devoid of its poetic context and careful parsing the play becomes simply a crude anti-semitic story (easily accessible full text online) -- with an audience of children.In perhaps Charles' most well-known work, Essays of Elia, the essay "Imperfect Sympathies" (also available online) displays his smarmy and shameless dislike of Scots, Jews and Blacks hiding behind a veneer of discriminating taste and judiciousness.

"Lunacy replaced moral defect as an explanation for violence in extraordinary circumstances."
In 1796 Mary Lamb thrust a knife into her mother's chest, in that instant breaking free of the drudgery that consumed her days, but at what cost? Sent to Fisher House, a private, quasi-affordable madhouse in Islington, Mary underwent the usual brutal and humiliating treatments dictated by science at the time, similar to those King George III was subjected to ten years before. Whether the madhouse experience damaged her creatively is still a source of discussion, but certainly she fell into line, causing no further disturbance, eventually moving into rooms of her own with the help of her younger brother, Charles Lamb. Eventually Charles and Mary Lamb devised a manner of living, what he called "double-singleness", Mary accepted into her brother's literary circle and appreciated for her sharp intelligence and intellectual curiosity. Together they co-authored three books, Tales from Shakespear (1807), Mrs. Leicester's School (1809) and Poetry for Children (1809).

Mad Mary Lamb is an extensively researched, impressive reconstruction of Mary's life on the fringes of literary society, freed by the act that sundered her from family obligations beyond the society of her brother. London was teeming with literary genius, the country infused with political uncertainty and a rapidly changing world where ideas were exchanged in lively debate in salons all over the city. Most women were hidden behind society's restraints, great literary achievements solely the purview of the male gender. While Charles moved in and out of his own creative forays, Mary nurtured seeds of her own writing. Her contribution to Tales of Shakespear was certainly equal to her brother's, a challenging task in any case. Mary's ability to empathize enabled her to step inside the identities of others: "It was her deep and sympathetic feeling, coupled with her intellect, that brought her admiration from men of such high standards as Coleridge."

What Mad Mary Lamb points out most succinctly is the blossoming of her writing life after the tragic event of the murder. Her creativity stifled by a spinster's role in society that relegated her to little more than a domestic servant, albeit to family, the murder offered Mary a unique opportunity she might otherwise not have known. Never audacious or brave enough to tackle the more dangerous boundaries, Mary Lamb transgressed just enough to participate in a lively literary life, at the side of her prolific brother, Charles Lamb, who was also an accomplished essayist. Yet her life after the death of her mother and interment in the mental hospital was far more than the dreary spinsterhood that would have been her fare had she not committed the crime. Hitchcock's attention to detail is extraordinary and extensive, with copious notes, bibliography and index, Mary Lamb brought to life on these pages, her crime, tentative reach toward life and the fulfilling world of writing afforded by a violent transgression against society's most basic tenant. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

Mary Had A Little Lamb, and A Knife.
This is an example of the Nineteenth Century literary imagination coupled with the new style of writing 'history' which doesn't have to stick with the facts but can create a few for entertainment effects.Mrs. Hitchcock used letters to show the human Mary Lamb.She suffered a madness similar to Mary Lincoln.Only through the intervention on the part of her brother who helped her to write TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE, she was not confined to a mental institution for the long years of her life.It was the literary redemption and the 'power of the written word' which save her sanity and her life.

It is the compelling story of the English Lizzie Borden.If her brother had not been the famous Charles Lamb, we would never have known about this tragic life and death and the circumstances which compelled her to kill her own mother with a big knife in 1796.Lizzie, on the other hand, used an ax to chop her father to death because of a supposed indiscretion (his or hers?) and a nasty step-mother.Perhaps he had it coming, to sequester an old-maid daughter to watch him faun over and fondle that woman in her mother's house.

You don't have to be in the throes of a mental illness to kill someone.There is a popular song called 'Killing Me Softly With His Song.'There are numerous incidences in ballads and folk tales about murders due to unrequited love and perceived slights.Even extensive and unwarranted criticism can induce the killing instinct of self-preservation.

I'm not saying that any of these caused her to kill her mother.She alone knew the deep reason for such drastic actions.Sometimes, people are just driven too far and their minds 'snap.'It is a type of temporary madness due to circumstances; it is a compulsion beyond their control.When the young boys in Chicago killed a neighbor boy as explained in the book COMPULSION and a more recent killing of a partly-autistic boy by two neighbor boys happened, no one really knows what makes children kill children.Kids are mean until they are taught by the adults in their families that you cannot always act on your wants and desires of the moment.

Mary would have surely lost her mind except for the loving care of her brother and his literary friends.Charles died in 1835 at the age of sixty, and she lived to be past eighty.They'd lived a sheltered life prior to a few years before the murder.The move may have brought on Mary's inclinations to hit back.

Photographs of the luminaries of that time and some drawings enhance the narrative.It is interesting, but not unusual.

Fascinating Story but Unfocused and Colorless Presentation
1. The subject of this book is great!
2. The writing style is a bit wobbly at times.
3. The author jumps around and discusses way too many famous literary figures who have little or nothing to do with Mary Lamb's personal triumphs and failures.
4. Very little is actually told about Mary Lamb, who is supposed to be the featured character of this story!
5. The author inserts a lot of modernistic idealogy that would have been unknown to English men and women in 1795.
6. Gives a quick summary of a very complex woman.
7. Gives an even quicker summary of a very changing, difficult, and dramatic period of English history. ... Read more

Book Description
In 1796 when Mary Lamb, in a sudden attack of violent frenzy, killed her mother, her brother Charles pledged himself to be responsible for her care, thus sparing her from threatened incarceration in Bedlam. For the next thirty odd years they lived, and wrote, together. Informed by feminist and psychoanalytic literary theory, this book provides an entirely new perspective on the lives and writings of Charles and Mary Lamb. It argues that the Lambs's ideological inheritance as the children of servants, their work experience as clerk and needlewoman respectively, and the role that madness and matricide played in both their lives, resulted in writings which were at variance with the spirit of their age. In particular, the intensity of their sibling bond is seen, in Charles Lamb's case, as resulting in texts stylistically and thematically opposed to the masculinist stance currently considered characteristic of Romantic writers. ... Read more

Book Description
Kathy Watson explores Mary Lamb's famous crime and her remarkable relationship with her brother Charles.

Author Mary Lamb, long considered by historians a mere adjunct to her brother Charles, was a woman of contradictions: fiercely domestic yet unmarried; maternal yet childless; a peaceful, loving woman susceptible to bouts of extreme violence.

In this fascinating book, Kathy Watson traces the extraordinary intertwined lives of Mary Lamb and her brother Charles, authors of the perennial children's book Tales of Shakespeare. Their uncommonly close relationship-an ersatz marriage-was bound ever closer after Mary murdered their mother with a carving knife during a psychotic episode. Sharing the same constellation of friends-Coleridge and Wordsworth among them-yet plagued by Mary's manic depression, the Lambs' lives have long been shrouded in ambiguity.

In The Devil Kissed Her, Watson documents the nature of Mary's mental illness and the terrible crime she committed in its haze, the lifelong devotion of Charles, and the brother and sister's dual existence in both the calm domesticity of their home life and the bedlam of nineteenth-century mental asylums. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Mary Lamb's Madness
Kathy Watson argues ably and nimbly that we should not regard Mary Lamb's madness as an occasional thing that visited her and left no traces, leaving the essential Mary Lamb behind.No, it was part and parcel of her personality, and can be seen in her writing as well.Watson discovers that outside of the famous TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE which she wrote with her brother Charles (splitting down the corpus of Shakespeare by ignoring the histories, writing up the comedies, and leaving the tragedies to Charles), Mary Lamb wrote other books as well, which she makes sound perfectly fascinating.I would love to read the "Mrs. Leicester" book and hope that Tarcher, which published this fine biography, will print a companion book of Mary Lamb's collected writing.

She hints also that Mary was drawn to many men, including the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was so sexy that she just couldn't help herself when he was around.Charles eventually had to ask Coleridge not to come around because a visit from him would find Mary going a little crazy.

Watson brings us into the early 19th century world of the madhouse, which is a pretty creepy place.Women with private means like Mary Lamb had their own rooms and own attendants, but still they must have seen some dreadful sights, making their lives very different from other women of their class who were in general protected from the seamy.You can never forget however, that Mary killed her own mother with a knife, a crime so rare that people hardly ever run into it, even judges with long histories of criminal cases, even hardened homicide cops.Why did she do it?Watson provides a limited answer.In my mind Mary Lamb's psychology was similar to Lizzie Borden's, except she was perhaps more lovable and had more of a humorous nature.But both were brooders and both nurtured an unassimilable hatred toward the patriarchal structure of the family. ... Read more