SOURCE: "The Anatomy of Idolatry: Hazlitt's Liber Amoris," in The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. No. 70, April, 1990, pp. 195-203.

In the following essay, Mulvihill attempts to reevaluate Liber Amoris, which he contends is not an unseemly self-exposure, but an analysis of the feeling of infatuation itself.

It has been said that we know too much about the Romantics. Certainly, we know too much about the author of Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion (1823), for, preoccupied with the autobiographical origins of this, William Hazlitt's only work of fiction, readers have largely misread the book itself. In this strange, obsessive little work Hazlitt recounts, in compulsive detail, his unrequited and disastrous infatuation with a lodging-house maid named Sally Walker. It is 'something between a work of art and a case history', according to Cyril Connolly, while Lord David Cecil has memorably said that 'No one ever edited his personality for...