A fascinating new study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'The Private
Lives of the Ancient Mariner' illuminates the poet's deeply
troubled personality and stormy personal life through a highly
original study of his relationships. In her last published work the
celebrated Coleridgean scholar, Molly Lefebure, provides profound
psychological insights into Coleridge through a meticulous study of
his domestic life, drawing upon a vast and unique body of knowledge
gained from a lifetime's study of the poet, and making skilful use
of the letters, poems and biographies of the man himself and his
family and friends. The author traces the roots of Coleridge's
unarguably dysfunctional personality from his earliest childhood;
his position as his mother's favoured child, the loss of this
status with the death of his father, and removal to the 'Bluecoat'
school in London. Coleridge's narcissistic depression, flamboyance,
and cold-hearted, often cruel, rejection of his family and of
loving attachments in general are examined in detail. The author
also explores Coleridge's careers in journalism and politics as
well as poetry, in his early, heady 'jacobin' days, and later at
the heart of the British wartime establishment at Malta. His
virtual abandonment of his children and tragic disintegration under
the influence of opium are included in the broad sweep of the book
which also encompasses an examination of the lives of Coleridge's
children, upon whom the manipulations of the father left their
destructive mark. Molly Lefebure unravels the enigma that is
Coleridge with consummate skill in a book that will bring huge
enjoyment to any reader with an interest in the poet's life and
times. Molly Lefebure (1919-2013) was a wartime journalist,
novelist, children's author, writer on the topography of Cumbria,
biographer, and independent scholar and lecturer. She is the author
of two other works on the Coleridge family and a volume on the
world of Thomas Hardy. Lefebure was secretary to Professor Keith
Simpson (1907-1985), the renowned Home Office Pathologist and head
of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital, with whom
she worked during the Second World War. While surrounded by
London's crime, grime and gruesome deaths she wrote a memoire,
published as 'Evidence for the Crown' (1955), which formed the
basis for the successful television drama, 'Murder on the Home
Front' (2013). Having been fascinated by her work in the
mortuaries, Lefebure continued at Guy's Hospital and studied drug
addiction for six years, which led her to write her first biography
of Coleridge ('Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium', 1974).
'Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' is the distillation of the
lifetime's thought of one whom many regard as having been one of
the foremost Coleridgean scholars in the world. 'Molly Lefebure's
insight into Coleridge's marriage is second to none. Her perception
of him as a man and a poet is intellectually formidable. She can be
both critical and understanding on the same page. There is a full
field of Coleridge scholars at the moment, but in my view Molly was
in there first, and is still the outstanding one.' From the
Foreword by Melvyn Bragg.
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