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“... Relaxation is my bane, Lady Morpeth. All my habits and tastes lean that way and in consequence I am going to wage war upon them all. I dread a languid yellow old age, hot, perfumed and dawdling, and I prefer our Julia’s course, active, smart, burnished and braced.’ This selection of letters to an adored sister concentrates on the ‘active, smart, burnished and braced’ aspect of an ambivalent personality and pattern of life ...”

“... Your letters began by being first to my intellect, before they were first to my heart,’ Elizabeth Barrett told Browning when they had been corresponding for over a year and had acknowledged their love. When she first got the fan letter from a fellow poet, six years younger and much less celebrated than she was, she took it for the opening of another correspondence such as she had had in the past with other men of letters – with Hugh Stuart Boyd on prosody, with Richard Hengist Horne on contemporary literature, with Benjamin Robert Haydon on the artist’s vocation ...”

“... In a spirited attempt to forestall criticism, Margaret Doody warns her readers that they may ‘feel horrified at what they they regard as a changeling-substitution of a mad Gothic feminist for the cheerful little Augustan chatterbox’ which is the conventional picture of Fanny Burney. Stimulated to anger by past biographers who see Fanny Burney as sunny and shallow, ‘dear little Burney’, who class her with, but below, Jane Austen, who are interested only in Evelina and the Journals, Professor Doody sets out to present an altogether different version ...”

“... an entire culture, the conflicts or negotiations of power within a whole historical community. Alethea Hayter deals with a single event, focusing on a particular moment in history, but she is not a new or micro-historian and is innocent of Foucauldian or any other theoretical ambitions. Nevertheless she explores her subject in such depth that she ...”

“... such a tiresome figure. That summer there was a tremendous heatwave, the ‘sultry month’ of Alethea Hayter’s title. Haydon worked with increasing desperation on his painting Alfred and the First British Jury. It was a hopeless endeavour. No one would buy it, hardly anyone would admire it: the painting would merely mark another stage in his ...”

“... and it is a relief to turn from the guilty pleasure of campaigning with Keegan and Alexander to Alethea Hayter’s more subtly engaging and absorbing presentation of her military families’ diaries. Soldiering for them was a purely domestic affair; and following the drum was like going to the office. Jane Austen would have thrown herself into their ...”

“... poor Haydon went to his studio and cut his throat. The last weeks of his life were described by Alethea Hayter in A Sultry Month, which, like The Immortal Dinner, uses a single episode as the keyhole through which to survey an age. Hayter’s book is more tightly structured and covers less well-trodden ground but ...”

“... housemaids. One blushes in reading, and feels like a person caught listening at the keyhole.’ Alethea Hayter’s new book reproduces hitherto unpublished letters from Lowell to his friend and confidante, Sybella Lady Lyttleton, but Portrait of a Friendship contains little to embarrass – or to satisfy – the would-be voyeur. As a ...”

“... events cast shadows over details which in an undramatic year, or season, can be more clearly seen. Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month, published in 1965, was one of the earliest and best examples of what has become a popular genre. Set in another heatwave, in June 1846, Hayter’s account weaves together the lives of the ...”

“... and suggests that Charlotte may have taken opium in order to induce them. She quotes Alethea Hayter’s description of the mental traits that (Hayter claims) predispose people to opium addiction, telling us that it represents ‘Charlotte Brontë’s condition at Roe Head with uncanny closeness’:Men and ...”