Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was an English essayist with Welsh heritage, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare (1807), which he produced along with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764-1847). Charles and Mary both suffered periods of mental illness, and Charles spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital during 1795. He was, however, already making his name as a poet. Despite Lamb's bouts of melancholia, both he and his sister enjoyed an active and rich social life. Their London quarters became a kind of weekly salon for many of the most outstanding theatrical and literary figures of the day. On her own, Mary Lamb published an epistolary work, Mrs Leicester's School (1809) which the poet Samuel Coleridge believed would and should be "acknowledged as a rich jewel in the treasury of our permanent English literature. " Among their other famous works are: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808) and Poetry for Children (1809).

After killing her mother with a carving knife, Mary Lamb spent the rest of her life in and out of madhouses; yet the crime and its aftermath opened up a new life. Freed to read extensively, she discovered her talent for writing and, with her brother, the essayist Charles Lamb, collaborated on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. This narrative of a nearly forgotten woman is a tapestry of insights into creativity and madness, the changing lives of women, and the redemptive power of the written word.

All of the available letters of Charles Lamb, a master of the English essay, and his sister Mary Anne published in this definitive, scrupulously edited work. The letters, many of them written to illustrious figures of the Romantic period, are generally agreed to rank among the finest in the English language. Transcribing where possible from the originals or facsimiles, Professor Marrs corrects textual errors found in previous editions, and he pays particular attention to establishing precise dates for the correspondence. He includes letters that were omitted from the last collection (published in 1935 and long out of print), and he has uncovered more than eighty letters never published before. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb totals five or six volumes, and presents nearly 1200 letters written by Charles and Mary, singly or together. The correspondence is fully annotated, the volumes are illustrated, and the holographic idiosyncrasies of the originals are rendered typographically wherever possible. Rich in revelations about the extraordinary lives of the Lambs, these beautifully written letters are an inexhaustible store of information about the Romantic era and its major figures-Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge. The publication of unexpurgated and authoritative texts is an important literary event. The first volume was published in 1975, the bicentenary of Charles Lamb's birth. It contains 102 letters written by Charles, many of them after Mary murdered their mother. Among the recipients were the poets Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. The letters provide shrewd observations on his friends' writings and his own, vivid descriptions of life in London, and compassionate but candid remarks concerning his family and acquaintances. Notes to each letter place it in context, quoting where necessary from the correspondence Lamb is answering. Volume I includes Professor Marrs's extensive Introduction to the entire collection. After supplying a biography of the Lamb family up to the murder, he treats Mary's and Charles's life together until Charles's death, tracing through the letters a relationship that remained warm and affectionate even under the shadow of Mary's insanity. Professor Marrs also gives the publishing history of the letters and sets forth the principles upon which his edition is based.