Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The subject of violence: Mary Lamb, femme fatale
- 2 Violence against difference: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and women's strength
- 3 “The aristocracy of genius”: Mary Robinson and Marie Antoinette
- 4 Unnatural, unsexed, undead: Charlotte Dacre's Gothic bodies
- 5 “In seraph strains, unpitying, to destroy”: Anne Bannerman's femmes fatales
- 6 “Life has one vast stern likeness in its gloom”: Letitia Landon's philosophy of decomposition
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The subject of violence: Mary Lamb, femme fatale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The subject of violence: Mary Lamb, femme fatale
- 2 Violence against difference: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and women's strength
- 3 “The aristocracy of genius”: Mary Robinson and Marie Antoinette
- 4 Unnatural, unsexed, undead: Charlotte Dacre's Gothic bodies
- 5 “In seraph strains, unpitying, to destroy”: Anne Bannerman's femmes fatales
- 6 “Life has one vast stern likeness in its gloom”: Letitia Landon's philosophy of decomposition
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
On 26 September 1796, the Morning Chronicle gave the following account of the “fatal catastrophe” that blighted the lives of Mary and Charles Lamb:
On Friday afternoon the Coroner and a respectable Jury sat on the body of a Lady in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day. It appeared by the evidence adduced, that while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case knife laying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room; on the eager calls of her helpless infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks approached her parent.
The child by her cries quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late – the dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room.
(LCML, 1: 45)Mary Anne Lamb, the murderer in question, had suffered years of neglect by her mother, and yet, as the newspaper account went on to say, “her carriage towards her mother was ever affectionate in the extreme.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fatal Women of Romanticism , pp. 21 - 46Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002