A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846

Hayter, Alethea: - Alethea Hayter was born in Cairo in 1911, where her father was a legal advisor to the Egyptian government. He died when she was 12 and they returned to England in reduced circumstances. She won a scholarship to study History at Oxford in 1929 and then worked as a journalist, as well as in Postal Censorship during the war. She was then posted to Greece, Paris, and Belgium with the British Council. Her first book, Mrs Browning, won the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1962, and was followed by A Sultry Month (1965), Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968), Horatio's Version (1972), A Voyage in Vain (1973), and The Wreck of the Abergavenny (2002). She was on the board of the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells theatres, and the Society of Authors' management committee, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. She was appointed OBE in 1970 and died in 2006, aged 94.