The Far Side of a Kiss

"When William Hazlitt published Liber Amoris, his 'book of love', in 1823, scandal rocked the literary world. He had chosen as the object for his grand Romantic passion a mere serving maid - thinking her the epitome of innocence and beauty - and she had disappointed him by proving just as tawdry as all the rest. But what of Sarah Walker, the subject of Hazlitt's unfortunate obsession? In a magnificent work of imaginative sympathy, Anne Haverty rescues her from silence and obscurity to let her tell her side of the story. 'He has put me in a book,' she says. 'He has used but a steel nib for his weapon but he has destroyed me as sure as if he used a blade and impaled me upon it.' She describes her gradual seduction by the wild man of letters, day by day, hour by hour, as she tries to ward off inappropriate advances without offending him and can't help but be fascinated by his stories of revolutionary France and the pleasures of Italy. With an extraordinary lightness of touch, Haverty summons up London life in an early nineteenth century boarding house and the mutual incomprehension between the literary world above-stairs and the more practical, le