H.    Did I not overhear the conversation downstairs last night, to which you were a party? Shall I repeat it?
S.    I had rather not hear it!
H.    Or what am I to think of this story of the footman?
S.    It is false, Sir, I never did anything of the sort.

In 1822 William Hazlitt, forty-four years old and married, was both tormented and enchanted by Sarah Walker, his landlady’s nineteen-year-old daughter. Liber Amoris is the chronicle of that obsession, an extraordinary fragment of Romantic autobiography that explores the unstable nature of what individuals perceive as ‘truth’, the unknowability of others, and leaves the reader unsure of who is victim, who seducer in this haunting relationship.


Gregory Dart sets Liber Amoris in its context of Hazlitt’s other writings from 1822-3, and provides a wealth of fascinating notes that take us deep into the period and the writer’s imagination.


Cover painting Vilhelm Hammerhøi: Interior, Young woman seen from behind, 1903-4. Reproduced by permission of the Randers Kunstmuseum, Denmark. Cover design StephenRaw.com