Liber Amoris Or The New Pygmalion [Paperback]

William Hazlitt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 9, 2002

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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About the Author

The son of an Irish Unitarian minister, William Hazlitt was born on April 10, 1778 in Maidstone, England. As a young man, Hazlitt studied for the ministry at Hackney College in London, but eventually realized that he wasn't committed to becoming a minister, so he began a career as a writer, an occupation he would follow for the rest of his life. In 1817, Hazlitt published his first book of essays, Round Table. This work was followed by Table Talk in 1821, Spirit of the Age in 1825, Plain Speaker in 1826, and his last lengthy piece, The Life of Napoleon, in 1830. Considered one of the most important English writers of all times, Hazlitt was a contemporary and friend of Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb. William Hazlitt died on September 18, 1830. He is buried in St. Anne's churchyard in Soho, England. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: IndyPublish (May 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1404313796
• ISBN-13: 978-1404313798
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,347,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Painful Love Story, August 3, 2003

By 

Beth Johnston - See all my reviews

This review is from: Liber Amoris Or The New Pygmalion (Paperback)

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was one of the best writers of essays in the English language, with a powerful, muscular, and modern prose style. He wrote about politics, the arts, literature, his friends (and former friends--he had a talent for alienating many of them) among the Romantics, including Coleridge and Wordsworth. He also wrote, thoughtfully and often charmingly, about himself and his own experiences. _Liber Amoris_, however, is an autobiographical account of a much more harrowing kind. It's the story of Hazlitt's love affair with the daughter of his landlady. Never very good with women (his first marriage was practically arranged by his best friend and fellow essayist, Charles Lamb), Hazlitt proved himself horribly maladroit in the handling of this romance. It was ill-conceived from the start. In 1820 Hazlitt was 43 and Sarah Walker was 19; Hazlitt, though estranged from his wife, was not yet divorced; and, as becomes clear over the course of the story, Sarah was actually much more worldly than Hazlitt himself. The failure of the affair brought Hazlitt to the brink of suicide; writing about it seems to have been his way of pulling himself back towards life by making sense of what had happened to him.

Why read a love story that sounds so grim? Hazlitt's contemporaries wondered the same thing, and were shocked by its publication in 1823, partially because, as Ronald Blythe put it in the introduction to my edition of _Liber Amoris_, "To write it, Hazlitt had to abandon the only thing which could have made it even remotely socially acceptable--dignity." The Victorians also hated the story because of Hazlitt's acknowledgment of a physical relationship between him and Sarah--there's nothing graphic by any stretch of the imagination in the book beyond a few kisses, but this was enough to offend delicate 19th century sensibilities.

But from a twenty-first century vantage point, most of these concerns have fallen away. We live in a confessional age where memoirists put their most tortured secrets on paper for public consumption; the idea of sexuality outside the bonds of marriage no longer has the power to make most of us faint dead away; and Hazlitt's method of composition seems as contemporary and up-to-the-minute as when it was written, a collage of dialogue, letters real and imaginary, and short, almost aphoristic musings on the nature of love and loss. Unobscured by shock and scandal, today _Liber Amoris_ bears incredible emotional force, because it shows without any attempt at prettification or prevarication a man in the throws of a doomed, obsessive, and largely unrequited love. The vast portion of the human race has felt what Hazlitt feels here: pathetic, dejected, undesired, aware of all that, and yet filled with an inexplicable longing, the sense that only one other person's nature fully appreciates his own. The reason to read and to admire _Liber Amoris_ is its unparalleled courage in committing to paper something that, whether it reflects well or ill on the teller of the tale, resonates with every human's experience.