Background
Hayter was the daughter of Sir William Goodenough Hayter, a legal adviser to the Egyptian government, and his wife, Alethea Slessor, daughter of a Hampshire rector.
(A brilliant and scholarly microcosm of a literary world.'...)
A brilliant and scholarly microcosm of a literary world.' Sunday Telegraph 'Alethea Hayter's skill and insight are outstanding, her work is a small masterpiece.' Anthony Burgess, The Bookman June 1846 was a month of fierce heat and political crisis in London. This sultry month was also a time of personal crisis for Carlyle and his wife, for Browning and Elizabeth Barrett and notably for the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. A cross-section of the close-textured life of literary London in the 1840s is tellingly portrayed. Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, the Carlyles, Monckton Milnes, the actor Macready, Mary Russell Mitford, Wordsworth and Samuel Rogers frequently met during these sweltering weeks, particularly since many of them felt constrained to give parties for the best-selling German novelist, the preposterous, one-eyed Grafin Hahn-Hahn, and her travelling companion Oberst Baron Adolph von Bystram. The secret crises and decisive actions of the members of this group affected them all, as did the weather and the political situation. The catastrophe which overcomes Haydon is, however, the central leitmotif. A fascinating and stimulating book based on contemporary letters, diaries, memoirs and newspapers, A Sultry Month pioneered a new form of group biography when it was first published in l965, which has since influenced many writers and scholars.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0571255795/?tag=2022091-20
(A publishing event - a new book by a renowned author - ab...)
A publishing event - a new book by a renowned author - about the literary connections to Britain's greatest maritime disaster From the author of the classic "A Sultry Month", comes a short work of narrative non-fiction that encompasses the literary and seafaring worlds. In 1805 John Wordsworth, brother of the more famous William, set sail from Weymouth Bay in charge of a large merchant ship. Intent on taking the Abergavenny round the frontier of the known world, the crew and commander were prepared for disease, piracy and the unknown. They didn't, however, suspect that they would never make it out of British waters and that hundreds would perish within sight of land. John Wordsworth planned to share the fortune he would make on the Abergavenny with William so he would be free to continue his poetry. Instead John ended in a watery grave and William would see that the best of his work was now behind him. This is an intimate and beautifully observed view of a family and the effects of tragedy.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0333989171/?tag=2022091-20
(Does the habit of taking drugs make authors write better,...)
Does the habit of taking drugs make authors write better, or worse, or differently? Does it alter the quality of their consciousness, shape their imagery, influence their technique? For the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century, many of whom experimented with opium and some of whom were addicted to it, this was an important question, but it has never been fully answered. In this study Alethea Hayter examines the work of five writers - Crabbe, Coleridge, De Quincey, Wilkie Collins and Francis Thompson - who were opium addicts for many years, and of several other writers - notably Keats, Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire, but also Walter Scott, Dickens, Mrs Browning, James Thomson and others - who are known to have taken opium at times. The work of these writers is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century opinion about the uses and dangers of opium, and of Romantic ideas on the creative imagination, on dreams and hypnagogic visions, and on imagery, so that the idiosyncrasies of opium-influenced writing can be isolated from their general literary background. The examination reveals a strange and miserable region of the mind in which some of the greatest poetic imaginations of the nineteenth century were imprisoned.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0571083609/?tag=2022091-20
(A brilliant and scholarly microcosm of a literary world.'...)
A brilliant and scholarly microcosm of a literary world.' Sunday Telegraph 'Alethea Hayter's skill and insight are outstanding, her work is a small masterpiece.' Anthony Burgess, The Bookman June 1846 was a month of fierce heat and political crisis in London. This sultry month was also a time of personal crisis for Carlyle and his wife, for Browning and Elizabeth Barrett and notably for the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. A cross-section of the close-textured life of literary London in the 1840s is tellingly portrayed. Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, the Carlyles, Monckton Milnes, the actor Macready, Mary Russell Mitford, Wordsworth and Samuel Rogers frequently met during these sweltering weeks, particularly since many of them felt constrained to give parties for the best-selling German novelist, the preposterous, one-eyed Grafin Hahn-Hahn, and her travelling companion Oberst Baron Adolph von Bystram. The secret crises and decisive actions of the members of this group affected them all, as did the weather and the political situation. The catastrophe which overcomes Haydon is, however, the central leitmotif. A fascinating and stimulating book based on contemporary letters, diaries, memoirs and newspapers, A Sultry Month pioneered a new form of group biography when it was first published in l965, which has since influenced many writers and scholars.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0860721469/?tag=2022091-20
(In the spring of 1804 Coleridge sailed to the Mediterrane...)
In the spring of 1804 Coleridge sailed to the Mediterranean in the hope of restoring his health, recreating his poetic energies and solving his emotional problems. During the voyage he kept a very detailed diary, and from this and from his and his friends' letters Alethea Hayter has painted a close-up portrait of Coleridge - both the outer and the inner man - at a comparatively little studied moment of his life, but a pivotal one. It was also an increasingly critical period in the Napoleonic War, and the movements of warships and convoys in the Mediterranean, and the problems of Nelson - personal as well as strategic, and in some ways parallel to Coleridge's - are interwoven with the narrative. Sara Hutchinson, the Wordsworths, Southey, the Lambs and Coleridge's other friends at home are also shown going about their affairs amid their anxieties about him during the six weeks while he travelled through storm and calm to reach an intellectual and emotional destination which was not the one he set out for. As those readers already familiar with Alethea Hayter's work would expect, A Voyage in Vain combines the pleasures of thoroughly researched biography, and criticism and social history, with the narrative sweep of a novel.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0571256074/?tag=2022091-20
Hayter was the daughter of Sir William Goodenough Hayter, a legal adviser to the Egyptian government, and his wife, Alethea Slessor, daughter of a Hampshire rector.
Lady Margaret Hall; Downe House School.
Hayter spent her early years in Cairo, Egypt, in the years before the First World War, where the three Hayter children were well taught by a governess. Alethea Hayter was only twelve years old. Her sister Priscilla later described their happy childhood in Cairo in her memoir A Late Beginner (1966).
Of her time at Oxford, Hayter later wrote "We were conventional and innocent, though we considered ourselves pioneering and revolutionary — not in politics, we were not much interested in them, but in our preferences in literature, the arts, social values.
In our Oxford days, none of us could have boiled a potato, let alone made a soufflé, or would have known an azalea from a stinging nettle." She is buried in the churchyard of Street Swithun"s, Headbourne Worthy. Following her years at Oxford, Hayter was on the editorial staff of Country Life until 1938.
During the Second World War she worked in postal censorship in London, Gibraltar, Bermuda, and Trinidad. In 1945, she joined the British Council, and in 1952 was posted to Greece as an assistant Representative.
In 1960, she went to Paris as Deputy Representative and assistant cultural attaché, and her apartment on the Île Saint-Louis became a meeting place for writers and artists.
Her last British Council posting was as Representative to Belgium, and she retired in 1971. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1962.
(Does the habit of taking drugs make authors write better,...)
(A publishing event - a new book by a renowned author - ab...)
(In the spring of 1804 Coleridge sailed to the Mediterrane...)
(A brilliant and scholarly microcosm of a literary world.'...)
(A brilliant and scholarly microcosm of a literary world.'...)
(Will be shipped from US. Brand new copy.)
(New)
She was a member of the governing bodies of the Old Vic and the Sadler"s Wells Theatre and of the management committee of the Society of Authors.