SOURCE: "The Logic of Passion: Hazlitt's Liber Amoris," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter, 1975, pp. 41-57.

In the following essay, Ready evaluates Liber Amoris as a literary exploration into the nature of the sympathetic imagination.

No matter what their attitudes toward his involvement with Sarah Walker, most readers of Hazlitt's Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion (1823) have been more concerned with the book as biography than they have with the book as literature.¹ Assuming that Hazlitt's only sustained narrative, and one of his longest works, can be viewed critically as well as biographically, I hope to demonstrate the integral position of Liber Amoris in Hazlitt's recurrent theme of the sympathetic imagination and to sketch the chief structural and imagistic characteristics of the text.

I

In "On the Spirit of Obligations" (1823), Hazlitt responded to the hostile reception Liber Amoris received. "What I would say to any friend who...