Lamb's Sister

THE ORDEAL OF BRIDGET ELIA--Ernest C. Ross--University of Oklahoma ($2.50).

At 10, Mary Lamb became a devout Mohammedan. Even then her nerves were high-strung: she was much upset when her Grandmother Field remained an Unbeliever. But Mary soon found a new interest: from the names on gravestones she began teaching her younger brother, Charles, the future author of the Essays of Elia, his letters.

At 31, Mary Lamb threw a fork at a domestic, missed the girl, but harpooned her feeble-minded father. Then she killed her mother with a carving knife. Such behavior was considered extraordinary even in literary circles that included Cole ridge, Godwin, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey. While friends hushed up the tragic affair, Mary Lamb was sent away to a private asylum (Charles had already passed six weeks in the Hoxton mad house). Coleridge wrote her letters of metaphysical commiseration, which baffled Charles and may have enraged Mary. One day after her release she was quietly talking to Coleridge. Suddenly she seized his wrist, fixed him with a glassy eye.

Shouting that there was not a moment to lose, the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner rushed out to get Miss Lamb recommitted.

As these attacks recurred over a life time of 83 years, during which Mary Lamb outlived all of her family and most of her friends, people grew used to seeing Charles & Mary, "weeping together and walking arm in arm toward the asylum." At other times, theirs was a far from unhappy life. As pieced together by Biographer Ross from the Lamb literary remains, from scraps of correspondence, there is little ordeal in the day-to-day doings of Bridget Elia (Lamb's literary name for his sister). What emerges is a singularly tender brother-&-sister relationship, of much charm, grace, fortitude, patience. In her long lucid intervals, Mary Lamb led a lively life: The Ordeal of Bridget Elia is a lively record of it.

Besides their great literary contemporaries, the Lambs were friends with such characters as Thomas Manning, the vagrant Orientalist, who always carried peppers in his pockets; Charles Lloyd, a neurotic Quaker, whose piano thumping drove Charles Lamb to write The Old Familiar Faces; George Dyer, who could never distinguish between prose and poetry, was so near-sighted that he once disappeared into a river while the Lambs' maid was watching. Doctors sometimes advised Charles Lamb that this eccentric circle was not the healthiest one for a spinster afflicted with intermittent lunacy. But Mary Lamb seems to have felt quite at home in it. At times when she did not, or when Charles, who was something of a tosspot (Mary used to leave his bedroom door ajar so that Charles would not have to fumble at the latch), was reforming, the Lambs would go for a browse in the country. On one vacation they estimated that they walked 350 miles.

She also found time to write. All the Lambs wrote. Even elder Brother John, who once knocked Hazlitt down, wrote a pamphlet on the prevention of cruelty to animals. It was best known for one 450-word sentence of protest against the broiling of eels alive. Mary's style was more condensed and prim, and writing was an agony for her. There were other literary ordeals too. While writing the Tales from Shakespeare, Mary complained that she had to describe so many women characters in boy's clothing. She said she thought Shakespeare was lacking in imagination.

Brother Charles once quipped: Mary can get all of an epigram but the point. For years Mary endured Charles's amiable habit of introducing her everywhere as an old soak. "Allow me, madam, to introduce to you my sister Mary," said he to Mrs. Balmanno, "She's a very good woman, but she drinks!" He also liked to praise publicly a mythical book he pretended she had written: Confessions of a Drunkard.

Once Mary Lamb managed to shock her brother. When Charles was reading aloud their friend Wordsworth's The Force of Prayer, which begins "What is good for a bootless bene?" (prayer), he was amazed to hear Mary answer: "A shoeless pea." It was the first pun he had ever heard her make.

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