BiblioVault - Books about Lamb, Charles

The Coast of Illyria

A Play in Three Acts

Dorothy Parker

University of Iowa Press, 1990

Dorothy Parker is a figure of legendary literary reputation, a fabled member of the Algonquin Round Table, and a highly visible literary personality of the twenties and thirties. Brendan Gill called her "a writer whose robust and acid lucidities were much feared and admired." This play, long forgotten and unpublished until now, will bring new attention to her stirring work.

The Coast of Illyria may represent Parker's most mature writing. Based on the story of Charles and Mary Lamb, this play shares the deeply felt theme of abandonment which gives Parker's poetry its haunting quality, along with the rich understanding of despair that characterizes her stories and other plays. Here these issues are explored with a depth, a sensibility, and a subtlety unlike anything else she wrote.

As Arthur Kinney describes in his detailed introduction, when Parker and her putative coauthor, Ross Evans, sat through rehearsals revising the script, it was generally felt that Parker saw herself, at least potentially, as the tragic Mary Lamb. "I am Mary Lamb," she told the actress who played the role, "do you see that?"

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Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer

Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography

Gerald Monsman

Duke University Press, 1984

More than Charles Lamb himself could ever know, the creation of Elia as his personal artistic voice was his way to endure the memories of September 22, 1796, a day of primal horror when his sister Mary in a fit of insanity killed their mother and destroyed the Lamb family. Throughout the rest of his life Lamb was faced with those memories , with deep-seated personal and career disillusionments. Yet through Elia he confronted his inner self to forge the essays that may be considered among the most brilliant and inimitable works in English letters.

Gerald Monsman in this study abandons the customary chronological approach to Lamb's life in favor of a more incisive, open-ended discussion of the Elia essays. By a close textual examination of Lamb's language, he relates the essayist's use of symbol and autobiographical concerns. Monsman contends and demonstrates that "as sharply and as pertinently as any artistic voice, Elia, the most celebrated persona in the nineteenth century, focuses the problems inherent in the modern literary imagination." Elia's "textual identity is a function of the author's actual life, of losses and imperfections artistically utilized and harmonized, employed against themselves to produce the rehabilitating symbol."

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Essays of Elia

Charles Lamb

University of Iowa Press, 2003

Charles Lamb, one of the most engaging personal essayists of all time, began publishing his unforgettable, entertaining Elia essays in the London Magazine in 1820; they were so immediately popular that a book-length collection was published in 1823. Inventing the persona of “Elia” allowed Lamb to be shockingly honest and to gain a playful distance for self-examination. The resulting essays touch upon a wide range of compelling subjects from the deliciously humorous “Dissertation upon Roast Pig” to the poignantly reflective “New Year's Eve.” Yet collectively they also comprise a fascinating personal memoir, veiled under the pseudonymous disguise of Elia. Now back in print with a new foreword by the distinguished personal essayist Phillip Lopate and with useful annotations, Essays of Elia will provide a delicious stylistic treat for all readers.

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Haphazard Families

Romanticism, Nation, and the Prehistory of Modern Adoption

Eric C. Walker

The Ohio State University Press, 2024

There are no provisions for adoption in English common law, and adoption wasn't legally formalized in England and Wales until 1926. But a century earlier, untimely adoptions navigated the new exceptionalism of childhood in Romanticism. In Haphazard Families, Eric C. Walker explores the history of the adopted child in Romantic-era England. Taking up the stories of both fictional and historical adoptees, he demonstrates how these children, diminished to nonpersons, shouldered the burden of social constructs of nation, family, gender, and class. Walker further demonstrates how Rousseau’s infamous failure to follow his own ideals of parenthood shaped British reactions in famous texts such as Frankenstein and Emma. Incorporating perspectives from Romantic scholarship and critical adoption studies and examining the stories of adopted children associated with Queen Caroline, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Austen, the Wordsworth siblings, Mary Shelley, Charles and Mary Lamb, Letitia Landon, and others, Haphazard Families considers how Romantic constructions of childhood supply foundational structures of modern adoptee subjectivity.

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