Author. She was an English author of the 18th century, who co-wrote "Tales from Shakespeare," with her younger brother Charles, which was an adaption of twenty of Shakespeare's work for Victorian children. This book has never been out of print. Like most women of the Victorian era, Mary Lamb received little formal education. For ten years, she was a seamstress and taught sewing to young ladies to provide an income for the family. She became the primary caregiver for her bedridden mother, a father with dementia, and her older brother, who was disabled. In 1796 in a manic fit, she stabbed their mother to death. The coroner inquest returned a verdict of lunacy. Her brother, Charles, attempted to save her from the madhouse by volunteering to care for her, yet she was place in a Victorian asylum for the mentally ill directly after the incident for a period of time and again a few times throughout her lifetime. In the early 1800s, she wrote for a children's literacy magazine. After finishing the collection of "Tales from Shakespeare," the book was published in 1807, with a second edition in 1809. She began writing her collection of tales "Mrs. Leicester's School," which was published in 1809 and went through nine editions by 1825. In 1810 she and her brother Charles published another collaboration, "Poems for Children." The books were published anonymously or under Charles's name in order to shield her from anymore unwanted publicity. These publications brought her and her brother out of poverty to becoming middle-class. Hiding her mental illness and the fact that she had murdered her own mother, she received notoriety and was accepted in literacy circled with other well-respected authors of the time such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Under the penname of Sempronia, she wrote "On Needle-work", which was published in 1815 in the "New British Lady's Magazine." The article received much public attention as it addressed sewing as a profession for ladies. After this article was published, she had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized in the mental asylum for a short time. With her mental illness worsening, she was placed in a home for the mentally ill in 1833 as her behavior had changed with the development of dementia. As Charles' health declined, he eventually joined her at the home and died December 27, 1834. Her mental illness was at a point that she did not understand for a time that her beloved brother had died. By 1842 she had moved into a house with a private nurse and her mental status improved, but she was becoming deaf. She died five years later. Today, she would have been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder and given medication. There have been at least two published memoirs, several plays, and several novels about Mary Lamb and her brother Charles, with some showing respect, kindness and understanding, while others were not. This includes the 2005 biography by Susan Tyler Hitchcock, "Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London." The siblings share a grave marker.