David Jays
Miss Lamb Is From Home
The Devil Kissed Her: The Story of Mary Lamb
By Kathy Watson
Bloomsbury 243pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
IT IS DIFFICULT not to begin with the murder. In 1796 in Holborn, London, a seamstress at the end of her tether snapped and stabbed her incapacitated mother to death with a carving life, while her senile father wept beside her. Her younger brother was searching for a doctor when the incident occurred. Remarkably, the killer was returned to her brother's care, and Mary and Charles Lamb remained together until the latter died in 1834. The Lambs have since bobbed through fashions in criticism and biography. Their essays and stories are intriguing cultural indicators, and their sensational past attracts our trauma-hugging present. Kathy Watson's strongly empathetic biography is the second in twelve months, while the London-loving siblings are central to Peter Ackroyd's latest novel about the capital.
Mary imagined that her mother forgave her for the murder, and Watson argues that, paradoxically, the crime was 'the best thing that could have happened. With that case knife, she had cut the ties that bound her.' You may resist this interpretation
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
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553