Liber Amoris, Or, the New Pygmalion

Hazlitt, as Pygmalion, mythologizes the obsessional love of his early forties. Galatea is Sarah Walker, the twenty-year old daughter of a tailor in whose house in Chancery Lane Hazlitt took lodgings after separating from his wife. He describes the joys, agonies and humiliations experienced as he worships in Sarah the perfection that he himself has created. The book is written from within the experience, consisting mainly of letters written at the time. It has an immediacy not to be found even in Rousseau and Goethe, Hazlitt's two great predecessors in this confessional mode. We live the constantly shifting moods and terrible self-delusions of the writer as they occur. We respond as if to fiction, but with a heightening awareness that this is the thing itself.