Table of Contents

Prologue - The Children of Genius Lose Their Fountain of Light
I Funeral at Highgate
II A time to lament
III The chilled heart

Part One - Resurrection
IV Beware, Beware
V Offensive disclosures
VI Better not look this way

First Landing Place - From Under the Tablecloth

Part Two - Sam
VII Little Sam
VIII The Torrents of Spring
IX Jesus man, including In pursuit of Tippoo Sahib, Francis Coleridge
X Jesus man continued
XI The pantisocrats
XII A chilled heart and a democratic marriage

Part Three - Taper in a Cottage Window
XIII Sermons and sedition and a father's kiss
XIV A seraph in clouts
XV The cradle

Second Landing Place - Crossroads

Part Four - A Mystic Peregrination
XVI A mystic peregrination - (I): Father as alchemical philosopher
XVII A mystic peregrination - (II): Beyond the grasp of reason
XVIII A mystic peregrination - (III) Father as mariner: The way ahead

Part Five - Trailing Clouds of Glory
XIX In which Papa goes to Germany and Berkeley goes to Heaven
XX The Vale of Elysium
XXI A Faery Voyager and a fine representative baby
XXII Darkness at noon
XXIII Sensibility and sense

Part Six - Samuel Taylor Coleridge V Napoleon Bonaparte
XXIV In pursuit of Tipoo Sahib - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
XXV Our man in Malta
XXVI Our man in Malta (Contd)
XXVII Confrontations

Part Seven - Confrontations
XXVIII And further confrontations
XXIX Ejuxria (Pg 306 - 316)
XXX News from the Aunt Hill concluding with some intimations
XXXI A case of unatural cruelty
XXXII Further news from the Aunt Hill

Part Eight - Locked Out Children
XXXIII A month at Brighton! Portrait of an excluded daughter
XXXIV A sunny stroll in Ambleside - Portrait of locked out sons

Part Nine - Shipwreck of the Faery Voyager
XXXV Shipwreck of the Faery Voyager

About the Author

Molly Lefebure (1919-2013) was a wartime journalist, novelist, children's author, writer on the topography of Cumbria, biographer, and independent scholar and lecturer. She is the author of two other works on the Coleridge family and a volume on the world of Thomas Hardy.

Lefebure was a secretary to Professor Keith Simpson (1907-1985), the renowned Home Office Pathologist and head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital, with whom she worked during the Second World War. While surrounded by London's crime, grime and gruesome deaths she wrote a memoire, published as 'Evidence for the Crown' (1955), which formed the basis for the successful television drama, 'Murder on the Home Front' (ITV, 2013). Having been fascinated by her work in the mortuaries, Lefebure continued at Guy's Hospital and studied drug addiction for six years, which led her to write her first biography of Coleridge - 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium' which was published in 1974.

'Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' is the distillation of the lifetime's thought of one who many regard as having been one of the foremost Coleridgean scholars in the world.

Reviews

'There are few biographers who can claim such a long, intense engagement with their subjects as Lefebure. If she sometimes writes as though convinced she has cleared up all the complex mysteries of Coleridge's character [...] perhaps it's because she lived with him, metaphorically speaking, longer than his children, his wife, or any of his other biographers ever did.'
Evelyn Toynton, Prospect, December 2013