SOURCE: Woodbery, Bonnie. “The Mad Body as the Text of Culture in the Writings of Mary Lamb.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39, no. 4 (autumn 1999): 659-74.

In the following essay, Woodbery considers Lamb's depiction of the maternal role and of children, maintaining that her writing, as social criticism, provided an outlet for her mental illness.

The Mary Lamb who was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” has not received much purchase in the Lamb biographies or literary criticism to date. That this should be so is understandable. The silence that surrounded the facts of Lamb's madness until after she died in 1847 was partially grounded in what Katherine Anthony calls a “conspiracy” by the Lamb family and literary friends to repress, for Lamb's sake, the gruesome events of that afternoon of 22 September 1796 when she stabbed her mother Elizabeth to death with a carving knife. Anthony says that the silence...