Böcker av Alethea Hayter

Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning has been the subject of many biographies her worth as a poet tends to be given short shrift. Her dramatic life-story has obscured her more lasting importance as a forceful and imaginative writer. This book focuses on these aspects of Mrs Browning, and on the quality of her poetry.

. This is a brilliant imaginative reconstruction, a work of virtuosity that immediately makes you want to re-read the play. In addition to this title, Faber Finds is reissuing the following of Alethea Hayter's titles: Opium and the Romantic Imagination, A Sultry Month, A Voyage in Vain and Mrs Browning.

In the spring of 1804 Coleridge sailed to the Mediterranean in the hope of restoring his health, recreating his poetic energies and solving his emotional problems. During the voyage he kept a very detailed diary. This title combines the pleasures of researched biography, and criticism and social history, with the narrative sweep of a novel.

June 1846 was a month of fierce heat and political crisis in London. This sultry month was also a time of personal crisis for Carlyle and his wife, for Browning and Elizabeth Barrett and notably for the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. This title portrays a cross-section of the close-textured life of literary London in the 1840s.

Does the habit of taking drugs make authors write better, or worse, or differently? Does it alter the quality of their consciousness, shape their imagery, influence their technique? For the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century, many of whom experimented with opium and some of whom were addicted to it, this was an important question, but it has never been fully answered. In this study Alethea Hayter examines the work of five writers - Crabbe, Coleridge, De Quincey, Wilkie Collins and Francis Thompson - who were opium addicts for many years, and of several other writers - notably Keats, Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire, but also Walter Scott, Dickens, Mrs Browning, James Thomson and others - who are known to have taken opium at times. The work of these writers is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century opinion about the uses and dangers of opium, and of Romantic ideas on the creative imagination, on dreams and hypnagogic visions, and on imagery, so that the idiosyncrasies of opium-influenced writing can be isolated from their general literary background. The examination reveals a strange and miserable region of the mind in which some of the greatest poetic imaginations of the nineteenth century were imprisoned.