A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846

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 …

June 1846. As London swelters – sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted – a glamorous coterie of writers and artists indulge in decadent parties. With her ringletted ‘face of an Egyptian cat goddess’, Elizabeth Barrett is courted by her secret fiancé, the poet Robert Browning, who plots their elopement to Italy; Keats roams the Heath; Wordsworth visits the zoo; Dickens is intrigued by Tom Thumb; the Carlyles suffer a marital crisis. But when the visionary painter Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide, their lives begin to spiral around the tragedy …

One of the first group biographies, inspired by the “Pop Artists”, Althea Hayter’s glorious A Sultry Month was a groundbreaking feat of creative non-fiction in 1965 – and as radical today.

“An experiment in the art of biography that has [been] never bettered.” — Guardian

“A form which was so new as to lack a name … A masterpiece.” — Anthony Burgess