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This text discusses how Mary Lamb, incarcerated within madhouses after killing her mother, became the confidante of such Romantics as Coleridge and Wordsworth and accessed literature in a way that would have been normally impossible for a woman of her class and time.

After killing her mother with a carving knife, Mary Lamb spent the rest of her life in and out of madhouses; yet the crime and its aftermath opened up a new life. Freed to read extensively, she discovered her talent for writing and, with her brother, the essayist Charles Lamb,... Read Full Overview