{"product_id":"a-sultry-month-francesca-wade-9780571372295","title":"A Sultry Month","description":"\u003cp\u003eThough she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo...\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'Never bettered.' Guardian\n\u003cbr\u003e'Wholly original.' Craig Brown\n\u003cbr\u003e'A pathfinder.' Richard Holmes\n\u003cbr\u003e'Extraordinary.' Penelope Lively\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eJune 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith 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 . . .\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOne 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'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\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Francesca Wade","offers":[{"title":"As New","offer_id":46144409665779,"sku":"7770002583902","price":14.95,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0634\/4284\/5939\/files\/9780571372294.jpg?v=1746475071","url":"https:\/\/www.harryhartog.com.au\/products\/a-sultry-month-francesca-wade-9780571372295","provider":"Harry Hartog Bookseller","version":"1.0","type":"link"}