THE DEVIL KISSED HER

British biographer Watson (The Crossing, 2001) paints a sympathetic and revealing portrait of Charles Lamb’s older sister Mary (1764–1847), one of the most important female writers of the Regency period.

John Lamb was a waiter at the Inner Temple, home of London’s elite barristers. Given educations suitable to their stations, his children lived comfortably until the death of their father’s patron forced a move to shabbier quarters, where the family became dependent on the children’s earnings. Mary, trained as a seamstress, had the added burden of caring for their sickly mother, whom she stabbed to death with a kitchen knife on September 22, 1796. Charles took the weapon from Mary’s hand and led her away to an insane asylum. Courts determined that she was not responsible for her actions and, after her illness abated, released her to Charles’s custody. For the rest of her life, Mary suffered periods of institutionalization when her illness (probably bipolar disorder) reached periodic crises. In between episodes, she and Charles carried on a curious existence, in which his earnings as a clerk at East India House supported a bohemian lifestyle in the company of some of the best-known writers and intellectuals of the era. Wordsworth and Coleridge were lifelong friends of the Lambs; Southey, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and William Godwin regularly attended their Thursday evening affairs. Godwin published their masterpiece, Tales from Shakespeare, for which Mary did the bulk of the work. Watson keeps the focus on Mary, detailing her friendship with Sarah Stoddart, who married Hazlitt, and her correspondence with Dorothy Wordsworth and other literary women of the age. Sadly, Mary’s disease continued to plague her, taking as much as three months from every year. Her writing career ended in 1815, but Mary outlived her brother by more than a decade.

A welcome reevaluation of an underappreciated author.