The Devil Kissed Her

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.

In this fascinating book, Kathy Watson traces the extraordinary intertwined lives of Mary Lamb and her brother Charles, authors of the perennial children's book Tales of Shakespeare. Their uncommonly close relationship-an ersatz marriage-was bound ever closer after Mary murdered their mother with a carving knife during a psychotic episode. Sharing the same constellation of friends-Coleridge and Wordsworth among them-yet plagued by Mary's manic depression, the Lambs' lives have long been shrouded in ambiguity.

In The Devil Kissed Her, Watson documents the nature of Mary's mental illness and the terrible crime she committed in its haze, the lifelong devotion of Charles, and the brother and sister's dual existence in both the calm domesticity of their home life and the bedlam of nineteenth-century mental asylums.