A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846

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'A brilliant and scholarly microcosm of a literary world.' Sunday Telegraph masterpiece.' Anthony Burgess, The Bookman time of personal crisis for Carlyle and his wife, for Browning and Elizabeth Barrett and notably for the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. A cross-section of the close-textured life of literary London in the 1840s is tellingly portrayed. Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, the Carlyles, Monckton Milnes, the actor Macready, Mary Russell Mitford, Wordsworth and Samuel Rogers frequently met during these sweltering weeks, particularly since many of them felt constrained to give parties for the best-selling German novelist, the preposterous, one-eyed Grafin Hahn-Hahn, and her travelling companion Oberst Baron Adolph von Bystram. weather and the political situation. The catastrophe which overcomes Haydon is, however, the central leitmotif. A fascinating and stimulating book based on contemporary letters, diaries, memoirs and newspapers, A Sultry Month pioneered a new form of group biography when it was first published in l965, which has since influenced many writers and scholars.

Author Bio

Alethea Hayter (1911-2006) read modern history at Oxford, and after a period writing for Country Life she joined the British Council, retiring in 1971. Her many books include Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1962), The Wreck of the Abergavenny (2002) and the acclaimed Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968). She was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.