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 most illuminating and insufficiently praised books of the last 60 years.' Observer 'Never bettered.' Guardian 'Brilliant.' Julian Barnes 'Wholly original.' Craig Brown 'A pathfinder.' Richard Holmes 'Extraordinary.' Penelope Lively June 1846. As London swelters in a heatwave - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists spend their summer wining, dining and opining. With the ringletted 'face of an Egyptian cat goddess', Elizabeth Barrett is courted by her secret fiance, the poet Robert Browning, who plots their elopement to Italy; Keats roams Hampstead Heath; Wordsworth visits the zoo; Dickens is intrigued by Tom Thumb; the Carlyles host parties for a visiting German novelist and suffer a marital crisis. But when the visionary painter Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide, they find their entwined lives spiralling around the tragedy . . . One of the first-ever group biographies, Alethea Hayter's glorious A Sultry Month is a lively mosaic of archival riches inspired by the collages of the Pop Artists. A groundbreaking feat of creative non-fiction in 1965, her portrait of Victorian London's literati is just as vivid, witty and enticing today. 'Elegant Hayter more or less invented the biographical form which is a close study of a brief period in the life of an individual or a group . . . A rigorous scholar [with] an artist's eye.' A. S. Byatt 'Hayter's clever, innovative book turned a searchlight on a time, a place, a circle of people; it has surely inspired the subsequent fashion for group biographies.' Penelope Lively 'Nothing I've ever read has flung me so immediately into those streets, that weather, that period. Hayter never forgets that people want stories, that lives are stories.' Margaret Forster 'Hayter could take a tiny chip of life [and] find within it the seeds of a whole existence.' Richard Holmes 'A pioneer . . . Beautifully written vignettes . . . Immaculate scholarship and intense readability.' Jonathan Bate 'Outstanding . . . A small masterpiece.' Anthony Burgess 'A brilliant recreation of London literary life in 1846, which is highly original in its form and narrative cross-cutting.' Julian Barnes

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, a bold experimenter in language and poetic technique, an advocate of social reform, an advanced and eccentric political thinker, a Byzantine scholar and something of a mystic. It is to these aspects of Mrs Browning, and above all to the quality of her poetry that the present book is dedicated. It places her in the literary and intellectual life of her time, as revealed by her correspondence with Ruskin, Thackeray and Benjamin Haydon, her discussions on prosody with Hugh Stuart Boyd and Uvedale Price and on aesthetics with R. H. Horne and Mary Russell Mitford; and, of course, with Robert Browning. Her great talent as a letter writer, and her influence on the prosody of poets of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are also considered.

Alethea Hayter's reconsideration of Elizabeth Barrett Browning restores her to her proper place as a poet, writer and thinker, as well as providing a portrait of an original, captivating and much misunderstood personality.

Julian Barnes has celebrated Alethea Hayter as belonging to that rare breed, 'the independent scholar, unaffected by the fashions and orthodoxies of academe.' Equally important he says 'is a sturdy independence of mind'. Alethea Hayter had that in abundance as all her Faber Finds reissues - "Horatio's Version," "Opium and the Romantic Imagination," "A Sultry Month," "A Voyage in Vain" and "Mrs Browning" - demonstrate.

What happened after the end of Hamlet, when the four corpses had been borne away? How did Horatio carry out the Prince's dying injunction to 'tell my story'? Alethea Hayter's narrative takes the form of the proceedings of a Court of Enquiry with Voltimand as Chairman, alternating with Horatio's commentary in his diary. As the one witness who knows all the facts, Horatio at first hopes he can bring out the truth by sticking to essentials, keeping out of the case the women, the voyage to England and, of course, the Ghost he was solemnly sworn not to mention to a living soul. But he finds himself up against formidable resistance . . .

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, and from this and from his and his friends' letters Alethea Hayter has painted a close-up portrait of Coleridge - both the outer and the inner man - at a comparatively little studied moment of his life, but a pivotal one. It was also an increasingly critical period in the Napoleonic War, and the movements of warships and convoys in the Mediterranean, and the problems of Nelson - personal as well as strategic, and in some ways parallel to Coleridge's - are interwoven with the narrative. Sara Hutchinson, the Wordsworths, Southey, the Lambs and Coleridge's other friends at home are also shown going about their affairs amid their anxieties about him during the six weeks while he travelled through storm and calm to reach an intellectual and emotional destination which was not the one he set out for. As those readers already familiar with Alethea Hayter's work would expect, A Voyage in Vain combines the pleasures of thoroughly 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.