A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb

In 1796 when Mary Lamb, in a sudden attack of violent frenzy, killed her mother, her brother Charles took her care upon himself, thus sparing her from incarceration in Bedlam. For the next thirty years, they lived and wrote together. Informed by feminist and psychoanalytic literary theory, this study provides an entirely new perspective on the lives and writings of the Lambs. Aaron argues that their ideological inheritance as the children of servants, their work experience as clerk and needlewoman, and the role played by madness and matricide in their lives resulted in writings that were at variance with the spirit of their age. Aaron focuses particularly on how the intensity of their sibling relationship led, in Charles's writings, to texts stylistically and thematically opposed to the masculinist stance currently considered characteristic of Romantic writers.