“Do not, I conjure you, let her unhappy malady afflict you too deeply. I…” — Mary Lamb | V2Melody

“Do not, I conjure you, let her unhappy malady afflict you too deeply. I speak from experience and from the opportunity I have had of much observation in such cases that insane people, in the fancies they take into their heads, do not feel as one in a sane state of mind would feel under similar fancies.”

Hard-won counsel drawn from her own experience of mental illness · Letter to Sarah Stoddart concerning her mother’s illness

About Mary Lamb

Mary Lamb

3 December 1764–20 May 1847

Mary Ann Lamb was born on 3 December 1764 in London, into a family whose modest respectability, intellectual curiosity, and later misfortunes would shape her entire life. She died on 20 May 1847, having survived nearly a decade beyond her beloved younger brother and lifelong collaborator, Charles Lamb. To many…

More by Mary Lamb

Poems by Mary Lamb

More remarks by Mary Lamb

“I think myself the only woman in the world who could live with a brother’s wife and make a real friend of her, partly from early observation of the unhappy example I have just given you, and partly from a knack I know I have of looking into people’s real characters and never expecting them to act out of it.”

On accepting others as they are rather than expecting them to mirror oneself · Letter to Sarah Stoddart, c. 1805–6

“You would like to see us, as we often sit, writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan: I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while.”

Affectionate portrait of collaborative domestic literary life with her brother · Letter to Sarah Stoddart, June 1806

“I believe it is every woman’s opinion that the condition of men is far superior to her own. ‘They can do what they like,’ we say.”

On the unequal freedoms of leisure and action available to men and women · Essay or letter on the duties of women, c. 1815