Article: Taking "Other Liberties" with Hazlitt's Liber Amoris.

However much readers and critics psychoanalyze William Hazlitt's persona in Liber Amoris (1823), it is abundantly clear that "H" simply wants what he cannot have--sex with "S." In the first part of Liber Amoris, William Hazlitt constructs--supposedly re-constructs--conversations he had with Sarah Walker, the daughter of the landlord of a boarding house where he lived from 1820 until 1822, when he moved to Scotland to facilitate his divorce from his first wife. He persists in his attempts to seduce her but is met with chaste resistance, despite his assertions that she sits in his lap, kisses him, and lets him "take other liberties" with her (302). The ambiguity of the ...