Sultry Month

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 . 'One of the most illuminating and insufficiently praised books of the last 60 years.' Observer 'Never bettered.' Guardian 'W holly original.' Craig Brown 'A pathfinder.' Richard Holmes 'Brilliant.' Julian Barnes 'Extraordinary.' Penelope Lively June 1846. As London swelters in a heatwave - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists spend their summer wining, dining and opining. With the 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 Hampstead Heath; Wordsworth visits the zoo; Dickens is intrigued by Tom Thumb; the Carlyles host parties for a visiting German novelist and suffer a marital crisis. But when the visionary painter Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide, they find their entwined lives spiralling around the tragedy . . . One of the first-ever group biographies, Alethea Hayter's glorious A Sultry Month is a lively mosaic of archival riches inspired by the collages of the Pop Artists. A groundbreaking feat of creative non-fiction in 1965, her portrait of Victorian London's literati is just as vivid, witty and enticing today. 'Elegant Hayter more or less invented the biographical form which is a close study of a brief period in the life of an individual or a group . . . A rigorous scholar [with] an artist's eye.' A. S. Byatt 'Hayter's clever, innovative book turned a searchlight on a time, a place, a circle of people; it has surely inspired the subsequent fashion for group biographies.' Penelope Lively 'Nothing I've ever read has flung me so immediately into those streets, that weather, that period. Hayter never forgets that people want stories, that lives are stories.' Margaret Forster 'Hayter could take a tiny chip of life [and] find within it the seeds of a whole existence.' Richard Holmes 'A pioneer . . . Beautifully written vignettes . . . Immaculate scholarship and intense readability.' Jonathan Bate 'Outstanding . . . A small masterpiece.' Anthony Burgess

When Viscount Castlereagh, leader of the House of Commons and architect of the Grand Alliance, committed suicide in 1822, the coroner's inquest could consider only two legal verdicts: insanity or self-murder. Public outrage greeted his burial in Westminster Abbey; the tradition lingered that a suicide's burial place be at a crossroads, with a stake through the heart to keep the lost soul from wandering. Probing a remarkable variety of sources and individual cases, Barbara Gates shows how attitudes toward suicide changed between Castlereagh's death and the end of the century. By 1900 the Victorians' moral censure of suicide and the accompanying denial that it was a widespread problem had been replaced by a more compassionate response--and also by an unfounded belief in a "suicide epidemic," which Thomas Hardy described as a "coming universal wish not to live.". Exposing a rich area of interaction between history and literature, and utilizing the methodology of the new historicism, Gates discusses topics ranging from the plot for Wuthering Heights to Victorian shilling shockers. Among other findings she includes evidence that Victorian middle-class men, particularly, tended to make suicide the province of other selves--of men belonging to other times or places, of "monsters," or of women. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.