Description
In her last published work the celebrated Coleridgean, 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.
About the Author
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 a 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 (ITV, 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 who many regard as having been one of the foremost Coleridgean scholars in the world.
Contents
Foreword by Lord Melvyn Bragg
Acknowledgements
Key to References
Prologue: The Children of Genius Lose their Fountain of Light
1. Funeral at Highgate
2. A Time to Lament
3. The Chilled Heart
Part One: Resurrection
4. Beware, Beware
5. Offensive Disclosures
6. ‘Better not to look this way‘
First Landing-Place: From Under the Tablecloth
Part Two: Sam
7. Little Sam
8. The Torrents of Spring
9. Jesus Man: Including in Pursuit of Tippoo Sahib – Francis Coleridge
10. Jesus Man (continued)
11. The Pantisocrats
12. A Chilled Heart and a Democratic Marriage
Part Three: Taper in a Cottage Window
13. Sermons, Sedition, and a Father’s Kiss
14. A Seraph in Clouts
15. The Cradle
Second Landing-Place: Crossroads
Part Four: A Mystic Peregrination
16. I: Father as Alchemical Philosopher
17. II: Beyond the Grasp of Reason
18. III: Father as Mariner
Part Five: Trailing Clouds of Glory
19. In Which Papa Goes to Germany and Berkeley Goes to Heaven
20. The Vale of Elysium
21. A Faery Voyager and ‘a fine representative baby’
22. Darkness at Noon
23. Sensibility and Sense
Part Six: Samuel Taylor Coleridge v. Napoleon Bonaparte
24. In Pursuit of Tippoo Sahib – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
25. Our Man in Malta
26. Our Man in Malta (continued)
27. The Departure
Part Seven: Confrontations
28. Confrontations
29. Ejuxria
30. News From the Aunt Hill
31. A Case of Unnatural Cruelty
32. Further News From The Aunt Hill: Triumph
Part Eight: Shipwreck of the Faery Voyager
33. Shipwreck of the Faery Voyager
Appendices: Locked-Out Children
I. A Month at Brighton: Portrait of an Excluded Daughter
II. A Sunny Stroll in Ambleside: Portrait of Locked-Out Sons
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Endorsements and Reviews
[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.
Lord Melvyn Bragg
There are few biographers who can claim such a long, intense engagement with their subjects as Lefebure. If she sometimes writes as though convinced she has cleared up all the complex mysteries of Coleridge’s character … perhaps it’s because she lived with him, metaphorically speaking, longer than his children, his wife, or any of his other biographers ever did.
Evelyn Toynton, in Prospect, December 2013
