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by Kathy Watson

Kathy Watson Arts and Literature English

eBook Title: THE DEVIL KISSED HER download

ISBN: 0747571139
Author: Kathy Watson
Publisher: BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING PLC; New Ed edition (October 17, 2005)
Language: English
Pages: 256
ePub: 1472 kb
Fb2: 1340 kb
Rating: 4.5
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Category: Biography
Subcategory: Arts and Literature

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The Devil Kissed Her. 271 printed pages. To read this book, upload an EPUB or FB2 file to Bookmate.

The Devil Kissed Her. On 22 September 1796 Mary Lamb murdered her mother with a carving knife. However, she was neither imprisoned nor punished, but instead released into the care of her younger brother Charles. They wrote the children's classic Tales from Shakespeare together, ran a literary agency, and had a salon frequented by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Godwin.

The Devil Kissed Her book. The Devil Kissed Her. ISBN. In this fascinating book, 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. 1585423564 (ISBN13: 9781585423569).

Title: THE DEVIL KISSED HER. by Kathy Watson. Recently Viewed and Featured. Select Format: Hardcover.

Hoxton Street itself was like a thoroughfare of madness. Plus ça change, some may think

a wonderful, moving and vivid book.

a wonderful, moving and vivid book. Amanda Foreman Praise for The Crossing: 'A haunting biography. Mail on Sunday 'An affectionate,acutely observed life of Webb. Sunday Times show more. The daughter of a Scottish mother and a Jamaican father, Kathy Watson was brought up in Devon.

I know we could charge money, but then we couldn’t achieve our mission. To bring the best, most trustworthy information to every internet reader. The Great Library for all. Author:Watson, Kathy. Each month we recycle over . million books, saving over 12,500 tonnes of books a year from going straight into landfill sites. All of our paper waste is recycled and turned into corrugated cardboard. Read full description. The Devil Kissed Her by Kathy Watson (Hardback, 2004). Pre-owned: lowest price.

Lamb, Mary, 1764-1847. In this work, the author aims to find the real Mary Lamb amidst all the contradictions of her life: to reconcile the modest, motherly lady who wrote Tales from Shakespeare with the murderess, and the 'lunatic' with the admired hostess. Above all, she examines an extraordinary brother-sister relationship, with each providing to the other a source of domestic stability and literary inspiration.

At the age of thirty one, Mary Lamb stabbed her mother to death. Amazingly she wasn't imprisoned but was instead released into the care of her younger brother Charles. Brother and sister were inseparable for nearly forty years. They wrote and holidayed together and were famed for their literary salon, frequented by the likes of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Godwin. But the Lambs' popularity existed in the shadow of Mary's recurring bouts of illness. Centuries before manic depression was to be diagnosed, Mary's collapses took her into an asylum for several months of the year. Kathy Watson's aim has been to find the real Mary Lamb: to reconcile the modest, motherly lady who wrote "Tales from Shakespeare" with the murderess, the 'lunatic' with the admired hostess. Above all Watson memorably examines a fascinating brother-sister relationship. Superbly researched, beautifully told, "The Devil Kissed Her" is a vivid and intimate portrait of one of literature's most tragically romantic figures.

Comments: (5)

Agalen

At a time when people were rather routinely hanged for non capitol offenses, Mary Lamb was released into her brother's cuistody after staqbbing her mother to death with a kitchen knife.
She went on to be a writer (with her brother, "lamb's Tales From Shakespeare") and be part of a literary circle that included a lot of writer contemporaries.
She went to a mental asylum several times in her life.
This book presents a good picture of a certain British subculture and also of the state of mental health in her day and time.
I found it interesting throughout.

Manesenci

While it is an interesting subject, I didn't feel like there was a great deal of depth. It is a very scholarly work, but not very entertaining.

Chilele

Charles and Mary Lamb's slim volume, "Lamb's Tales Of Shakespeare" has been one of two children's books in continous publication since the late 1700's (the other is Robinson Crusoe). The lines in an encyclopedia do not begin to describe the intertwined histories of the brother and sister authors. Kathy Watson has attempted a daunting task: To put into context eighteenth century English societal structure, women's roles and education in said society, and historical treatment and diagnosis of mental conditions, all amidst the author's effort to tell a cohesive individual family history of at least two generations from birth to death. May I add, in 238 pages. The end result is sloppy, headache-inducing, confused, and exhausting for the reader. Focus and vision is what this book lacks, and a feeling that historical letters and documents that should have been rigorously used and cited, and were not, leads readers with a gaping absence of solid documentation. Instead we are left with imagined fancies of possibilities and insinuations that are annoying and amateurish. The story of brother and sister Charles and Mary Lamb had the basis for a compelling historical and societal story, but is miles away from fruition in this work. An initial enthusiasm and energy in the beginning quickly fades to a dull desperation. Her conclusion that Mary's life took a turn for the better when she killed her mother in a fit of manic rage was quite disturbing. The liberties taken demote this book from a potential literary history to tawdry dime store novel.

Steel_Blade

The book is slim. It is heavily padded. If someone wrote a poem, the author quotes the poem at length. If someone wrote a short story, the plot of the story is given in excessive detail. If a letter was written, it is also quoted. But no matter how much original material gets quoted, the book is still almost unreadable because of the bizarre errors of punctuation.

p. 122 A Midsummer's Night Dream
p. 123 A Midsummer Night's Dream
p. 124 A Midsummer's Night's Dream

How can anyone (author or editor) allow that to happen over the brief course of three pages?

The author has no idea how to punctuate relative clauses after proper nouns, so we get a strange mixture of "use the comma this time" and "don't use the comma in the next sentence. "Oxberry, who..." followed by "Barnett who...." On p. 158, we get one paragraph that contains "Monkhouse, who..." and "Burney who..." and "Alsager, who...."

When you add things like "grammer" (p. 121), you end up with a book that is laughably unreadable, which is a pity because this is a very interesting story. Mary Lamb murders her mother and then spends the rest of her long life in and out of insane asylums, while her famous brother (Charles Lamb) tries to take care of her. Even when they both achieve literary fame, the ominous shadow of the madhouse looms over them. But the importance of the story is negated by the constant punctuation errors.

Clandratha

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.

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