The Devil Kissed Her
The Story of Mary Lamb co-author of Tales from Shakespeare
The Devil Kissed Her by Kathy Watson is the story of Mary Lamb authoress and mad woman.
I had a sister
The devil kissed her
And raised a blister
Charles Lamb
Mary Lamb and her brother Charles are most well known for their collaborative effort on the classic children’s book Tales from Shakespeare. The bulk of the work was done by Mary who was highly regarded by her peers and friends who were some of the greatest literary giants of all time such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
Her friend’s high regard for her achievement was well deserved. Mary was not only an excellent writer with strong skills in narrative and plot direction but also a survivor. Mary Lamb suffered from madness and on September 22, 1796, she took a carving knife from the dining table and stabbed her mother to death. The book The Devil Kissed Her: The Story of Mary Lamb by Kathy Watson brings us the fascinating life of a woman who lived valiantly in the face of mental illness and the brother who protected her for the duration of her life.
Kathy Watson skillfully weaves together the details of their lives from birth and their years of relative comfort, through the onset of Mary’s madness, to the relatively mundane adult live’s (interspersed with regular periods of excitement when Mary went mad and was committed to an asylum) of Mary and Charles.
Watson does not list her sources. However, from comments in the text it seems that most of her research was done by reading the vast quantities of letters written by the Lambs and their peers. In an era when letter writing was necessary and popular, the Lambs and their intellectual friends were wonderful correspondents. From these personal missives, Watson pieces together the lives of two brilliant but unstable minds.
The focus of this biography is on Mary and her relationships with her brother and friends. These relationships sustained Mary through the difficulties of her illness. At the same time, these relationships and the erratic nature of her friends and brother could cause her to plunge into another round of madness. The most important relationship to Mary was that of her brother Charles. After the murder of her mother, Mary was given a remarkable amount of mercy by the law and by society at large, who handed into her brother’s keeping.
The two, who were close before the event, were inseparable until Charles death nearly forty years later. Many times in the book, Watson mentions the incredible closeness of the two and how it both sustained and crippled the pair. The closeness was clearly one of the thesis on which she brought the information together. Yet in some ways, Watson strays from her center and if it weren’t for her strong declarative statements of their close relationship, the importance of that tie might be missed when reading this book.
Despite the feeling that the book wanders off target occasionally, one cannot help but be fascinated by the descriptions of life in a world that we understand poorly and by the tremendous grace and strength with which the Lambs approached that life. That strength of will is also part of Watson’s focus in the book and she ends with a beautiful tribute to that strength of will.
Deep within her heart, she kept alive the dreams of childhood only to create them anew in fiction. There was a rare courage too. Again and again, she rose above the great tragedy of her life to find and to give pleasure...Mary presents herself in a series of powerful images...my personal favourite – merry Mary, emerging from under the shadow of madness, gallivanting her way around Regency London, living out her life brightly and bravely.
