Books by Alethea Hayter

Wine and dine with Victorian London's literati in a heatwave in one of the first ever group biographies, introduced by Francesca Wade (author of Square Haunting). Though she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo ... >One of the first group biographies, inspired by the "Pop Artists", Althea Hayter's glorious A Sultry Month was a groundbreaking feat of creative non-fiction in 1965 - and as radical today. "An experiment in the art of biography that has [been] never bettered." -- Guardian "A form which was so new as to lack a name ... A masterpiece." -- Anthony Burgess

Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning has been the subject of many biographies her worth as a poet tends to be given short shrift. Her dramatic life-story has obscured her more lasting importance as a forceful and imaginative writer. This book focuses on these aspects of Mrs Browning, and on the quality of her poetry.

. This is a brilliant imaginative reconstruction, a work of virtuosity that immediately makes you want to re-read the play. In addition to this title, Faber Finds is reissuing the following of Alethea Hayter's titles: Opium and the Romantic Imagination, A Sultry Month, A Voyage in Vain and Mrs Browning.

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. This title combines the pleasures of researched biography, and criticism and social history, with the narrative sweep of a novel.

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.