The Devil Kissed Her

A biography of Mary Lamb: murderess, madwoman, and co-author with her brother Charles of the children's classic "Tales from Shakespeare".

---

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.