Diana Athill
Life with a Genius Junkie
The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge
By Molly Lefebure
Victor Gollancz 288pp £15.95 order from our bookshop
Sarah Fricker was pretty, lively, intelligent, well educated, generous-hearted and abundantly healthy: an exceptionally suitable mate for a man bent on founding an ideal society in virgin territory. Not that Robert Southey had put much thought into choosing her for his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when the two young men were planning their ‘Pantisocracy’ in America. She and her sister Edith just happened to be conveniently to hand as friends of his childhood, and Sarah, anyway (Edith, who become Southey’s wife, was always singularly ‘unanimated’), was eager to escape. Her family had been suddenly became penniless as a result of her father’s fecklessness. The Fricker girls were working as seamstresses when the would-be Pantisocratists pounced.
STC (his preferred form of address), intoxicated by his vision of utopia, accepted the idea of marrying Sara (he made her drop the ‘h’) with scarcely a thought – and was to insist in the future that it had been a tragic mistake. His youthful enthusiasm and his friend had
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Surveillance, facial recognition and control: my review of @jonfasman's "We See It All" https://literaryreview.co.uk/watching-the-watchers via @Lit_Review
I reviewed Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden for @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-directors-cut
'Retired judges have usually had long careers on the bench, during which they have acquired an ingrained reticence when it comes to speaking on controversial topics. Not so Sumption.'
Dominic Grieve reviews Jonathan Sumption's 'Law in a Time of Crisis'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-case-for-the-citizen