Mary Lamb

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Mary Ann Lamb (3 December 1764 - 20 May 1847), was an English writer, the sister and collaborator of Charles Lamb. In 1796, Mary, who had suffered a breakdown from the strain of caring for her family, killed her mother with a kitchen knife, and from then on had to be kept under constant supervision. When their senile father died, her younger brother became her official guardian. They lived together and in 1823 they met and adopted an orphan, Emma Isola, who later married Charles's publisher Edward Moxon. In 1807, Mary collaborated with Charles on a children's book, Tales from Shakespeare, and they produced other popular works for children in later years. On her own, Mary Lamb published an epistolary work, Mrs Leicester's School, which the poet Samuel Coleridge believed would and should be "acknowledged as a rich jewel in the treasury of our permanent English literature." It is with this book, concerning the tales of a variety of motherless and orphaned girls, that Mary Lamb seemed to deal with the personal themes of grief and guilt. Though her solo turn, critically acclaimed at the time, has not outlived its era, Tales from Shakespeare continues to be in print.