The Devil Kissed Her: the story of Mary Lamb Kathy Watson Bloomsbury, 245pp, £16.99 ISBN 0747571090

Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare has the rare distinction of never having been out of print since its publication in 1807. Originally written for children, it was the book that projected Charles Lamb into public prominence, though he had yet to gain the recognition he sought from his criticism and essays. For him, it was hack work, and he was happy to share the writing with his sister, Mary, who helped to transform 14 complex plots into imaginative narratives. Mary had always been a writer-in-waiting, and she was overjoyed when Tales sold out on its first day of publication.

Eleven years earlier, in 1796, Mary had stabbed her mother to death with a car-ving knife. She was 31 and had, quite literally, lost her mind. At the time, she was the family's housekeeper and sole breadwinner, sometimes sewing for up to 18 hours a day, while looking after her bedridden mother, senile father, dotty aunt and younger brother, Charles, who was himself recovering from a nervous breakdown. Had she been alive in the 1960s, she would have been a perfect candidate for R D Laing's theory that madness is a corollary of family dynamics.

After the murder, Mary was confined to an asylum, and for ten days had no memory of what she had done. To save her from prison, Charles opted to take care of her himself. In 1799, after the death of their father, they set up home together and for almost 40 years lived side by side in what was in many ways an ersatz marriage.

History has always tended to cast Charles as the sacrificial victim on the altar of Mary's madness. Yet the symbiosis between brother and sister was far more complex than that, as Kathy Watson's vivid biography reveals.

Mary was aged ten when Charles was born in 1775. Their mother had borne seven children, and lost four, and the family lived in two cramped rooms in the Inner Temple, where their father was personal servant to Samuel Salt, a widowed barrister and their benefactor. Both parents favoured their elder son, John, and Mary became a surrogate mother to Charles. They were inseparable, and their interdependence was established early on. Mary was creative, sensitive and intelligent, and loved books, but was forced to train as a seamstress while her brothers benefited from the education that she was denied and took up positions as clerks. However, after the death of Samuel Salt in 1792, the family was in effect ruined.

The irony of Mary's crime is that once she had absolved herself from guilt (she believed in her mother's forgiveness, writing, to Charles soon after the crime, of her mother's spirit descending upon her, smiling), it freed her to live a life of which she could previously only have dreamed. She was aware that she could never marry, but she had a remarkable gift for intimate friendship and a touching empathy with children, and by the end of 1803, she and Charles knew the patterns of her illness so well, that she was able to admit herself to an asylum prior to each attack. They learned to cope and, vitally for Mary, began writing together.

After Tales From Shakespeare, they wrote Mrs Leicester's School (1808) and Poetry for Children (1809). They began to give informal parties at their attic apartment in the Inner Temple and, for ten years, this Thursday-night salon drew "a ragged regiment" of writers, thinkers, wits and radicals. Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Hazlitt and William Godwin were all close friends, and only as Mary's attacks became more frequent did their lives start to close in.

Charles finally left his mark on posterity with his series of intimate "Essays of Elia" for the London Magazine, and in 1825, after 33 years' service, retired from the East India Company. His drinking - never moderate - became worse and his dependence on Mary total. He died in 1834, after a cut from a fall became fatally infected. Amazingly, Mary survived him by 13 years. She outlived most of her closest friends and died in 1847 at the age of 82. She was buried in her brother's grave at Edmonton cemetery.

Their remaining friends celebrated a life of unique devotion circumscribed by her madness, but the truth was that the Lambs had not chosen to live like this. In spite of their love for each other, both knew what they were missing and struggled with periods of hopeless despair. The wonder was that they overcame any of it, yet time and again, Mary surfaced from the tragedy of her life "to find and to give pleasure".

"Also Mary Ann Lamb" is all it says on her and her brother's headstone after the sonnet that commemorates Charles. But as Watson notes, she was so very much more than an "also".

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