Watson begins, naturally enough, with a description of the Lamb household while the children were growing up. From a life of relative comfort in the early years (their father was the personal servant of Samuel Salt, a widowed barrister who lived in the Inner Temple), she traces the decline of their fortunes after Salt’s death. Coupled with building family pressures, including a cantankerous sister-in-law whom Elizabeth Lamb, their mother, didn’t get along with, and rising financial troubles, the atmosphere in the Lamb household went from bad to worse as they moved into smaller, more cramped accommodation. In all of this, we also get a closer look at Mary who, denied the better education afforded her brothers, was apprenticed as a mantua maker, spending hours on end painstakingly sewing ladies’ clothes or tending to her sick mother who was, by 1796, totally dependent on her.

Unlike the Lambs’ earliest biographers, including their close friend Talfourd, Watson tackles the unpleasant head-on. In fact, the opening sentence of the book is, ‘On the afternoon of 22 September 1796, Mary Lamb killed her mother’. For years this little-known fact about Mary’s past was kept from the public by friends and well-wishers who couldn’t reconcile the charming Mary of literary soirees with her wild and dangerous alter ego. However, for numerous reasons, this event is central to an understanding of Mary’s life and no biography of her would be complete without a discussion of it. It left her with a life-long guilt that frequently appeared in her writings and was a perpetual source of mental anguish to her. At the same time, her mother’s death was curiously liberating: soon after, their father died, and the brother and sister set up house together, an arrangement that lasted for the next forty years.

‘The Devil Kissed Her’ is an extremely readable biography because Watson has taken care to include a considerable amount of background material on the social conditions of the time. She touches upon the hardships of mantua makers and the deplorable state of privately-run and state-owned lunatic asylums. She also gives a brief overview of the then-current debate on the moral value of children’s literature. Above all, when describing Charles and Mary Lamb’s love of city life, Watson paints a vivid picture of what it was like, including trips to the theatre, literary gatherings, etc. In fact, for most readers, this is where the heart of the biography lies: the famous literary gatherings hosted by the Lambs, where poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, the essayist William Hazlitt, actors, critics and writers played cards, drank and debated the issues of the day.

Watson has certainly done much to make the character of Mary Lamb, and her brother Charles, come to life. In the process, of course, she has had to give up a strictly scholarly approach for a more personal one, delving imaginatively into Mary’s mind through her letters to friend Sarah Stoddart, her writings, and contemporaries’ recollections. In the end, Mary comes through as an intelligent, compassionate woman who tried to live life to the fullest, socializing, holidaying, and writing in between battling with depression and severe bouts of mental illness. Her greatest literary achievement was ‘Tales from Shakespeare.’ Though Charles contributed to the collection, it was primarily her project and it is what she is best remembered for.

---

Shahbano Bilgrami is a freelance writer and copy editor who lives in Morgantown, West Virginia. Aside from being a regular book and film reviewer, she has had poetry published in An Anthology (OUP 1997) and has authored/contributed to several children’s textbooks during her eight-year period as editor at Oxford University Press, Pakistan. She is currently working on her first novel.

---

---

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.