SOURCE: Marsden, Jean I. “Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare.” Children's Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children 17 (1989): 47-63.

In the following essay, Marsden maintains that Mary Lamb played a significant role in the "gender-based division (and revision)” evident in the female-focused Tales from Shakespeare.

On September 21, 1796, in a fit of madness, Mary Lamb picked up a knife and fatally stabbed her mother. Mary recovered and spent the remainder of her long life looking after her brother Charles and writing children's books, including the popular Tales from Shakespeare (1807). Mary's family and friends, it seems, were kinder to her than literary history has been; today she is remembered almost exclusively as the perpetrator of a lurid matricide. As a result, her role in the composition of Tales from Shakespeare has been almost completely overlooked. Mary began the project and wrote fourteen of the...