A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846
Alethea Hayter
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
Wine and dine with Victorian London's literati in a heatwave in one of the first ever group biographies, introduced by Francesca Wade (author of Square Haunting). Though she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo ...
June 1846. As London swelters - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists indulge in decadent parties. With her ringletted 'face of an Egyptian cat goddess', Elizabeth Barrett is courted by her secret fiancé, the poet Robert Browning, who plots their elopement to Italy; Keats roams the Heath; Wordsworth visits the zoo; Dickens is intrigued by Tom Thumb; the Carlyles suffer a marital crisis. But when the visionary painter Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide, their lives begin to spiral around the tragedy ...
One of the first group biographies, inspired by the "Pop Artists", Althea Hayter's glorious A Sultry Month was a groundbreaking feat of creative non-fiction in 1965 - and as radical today.
"An experiment in the art of biography that has [been] never bettered." -- Guardian
"A form which was so new as to lack a name ... A masterpiece." -- Anthony Burgess
Product Details
Price
$16.95
$15.76
Publisher
Faber & Faber
Publish Date
September 13, 2022
Pages
256
Dimensions
5.2 X 8.4 X 1.1 inches | 0.7 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780571372294
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About the Author
Alethea Hayter was born in Cairo in 1911, where her father was a legal advisor to the Egyptian government. He died when she was 12 and they returned to England in reduced circumstances. She won a scholarship to study History at Oxford in 1929 and then worked as a journalist, as well as in Postal Censorship during the war. She was then posted to Greece, Paris, and Belgium with the British Council. Her first book, Mrs Browning, won the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1962, and was followed by A Sultry Month (1965), Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968), Horatio's Version (1972), A Voyage in Vain (1973), and The Wreck of the Abergavenny (2002). She was on the board of the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells theatres, and the Society of Authors' management committee, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. She was appointed OBE in 1970 and died in 2006, aged 94.
Reviews
"Hayter more or less invented [this] biographical form ... A rigorous scholar [with] an artist's eye." -- A.S Byatt "Brilliant." -- Julian Barnes "Extraordinary." -- Penelope Lively "A fascinating and wholly original new approach to history in this slice-of-life portrait of artistic London." -- Craig Brown
"A pathfinder ... Hayter could take a tiny chip of life [and] find within it the seeds of a whole existence." -- Richard Holmes "Never Bettered." -- Guardian
"A pathfinder ... Hayter could take a tiny chip of life [and] find within it the seeds of a whole existence." -- Richard Holmes "Never Bettered." -- Guardian
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