A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb

by Jane Aaron

Overview

In 1796 when Mary Lamb, in a sudden attack of violent frenzy, killed her mother, her brother Charles took her care upon himself, thus sparing her from incarceration in Bedlam. For the next thirty years, they lived and wrote together. Informed by feminist and psychoanalytic literary theory, this study provides an entirely new perspective on the lives and writings of the Lambs. Aaron argues that their ideological inheritance as the children of servants, their work experience as clerk and needlewoman, and the role played by madness and matricide in their lives resulted in writings that were at variance with the spirit of their age. Aaron focuses particularly on how the intensity of their sibling relationship led, in Charles's writings, to texts stylistically and thematically opposed to the masculinist stance currently considered characteristic of Romantic writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198128908
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/12/1991
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	5.63(w) x 8.81(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

University College of Wales, Aberystwyth

Table of Contents

	List of Abbreviations	x
	Introduction	1
1.	Rank and Gender	20
2.	Work and Time	51
3.	'We are in a manner marked'	97
4.	A Modern Electra	115
5.	'The impertinence of manhood'	133
6.	'Bridget and I should be ever playing'	167
	Bibliography	208
	Index	215

Editorial Reviews

"Life and work themselves sometimes appear as different sides of a gentle paradox as Aaron produces a biography which is ultimately satisfying about both."—Studies in English Literature

"A lively, provocative book about a decidedly odd couple."—Choice

From the Publisher