Alethea Hayter

Alethea Catharine Hayter (7 November 1911 – 10 January 2006) was an English author and British Council Representative.

Family and early life Hayter was the daughter of Sir William Goodenough Hayter, a legal adviser to the Egyptian government, and his wife, Alethea Slessor, daughter of a Hampshire rector. Her brother, another Sir William Goodenough Hayter, went on to become British ambassador to the Soviet Union and Warden of New College, Oxford, while her sister Priscilla Napier was a biographer.

Hayter spent her early years in Cairo, Egypt, in the years before the First World War, where the three Hayter children were well taught by a governess. The children's lives changed dramatically when their father died, still in his fifties, and they returned to England in reduced circumstances. Alethea Hayter was only twelve years old. Her sister Priscilla later described their happy childhood in Cairo in her memoir A Late Beginner (1966). The three all won scholarships for their higher education. Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968), Horatio’s Version (1972) and A Voyage in Vain (1973). Mrs Browning: A Poet's Work and its Setting (1962) Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1965) A Sultry Month (1965) Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968, rev. 1998) Horatio's Version (1972) A Voyage in Vain: Coleridge's Journey to Malta in 1804 (1973) FitzGerald to His Friends: Selected Letters of Edward FitzGerald (1979) [ed.] Portrait of a Friendship: Drawn from New Letters of James Russell Lowell to Sybella Lady Lyttelton, 1881-91 (1990) [ed.] The Backbone: Diaries of a Military Family in the Napoleonic Wars (1993) [ed.] Charlotte M Yonge (British Council's Writers and their Work series, 1996) A Wise Woman: A Memoir of Lavinia Mynors from her Diaries and Letters (1996) [ed.] The Wreck of the Abergavenny (2002)

Honours Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1962 Order of the British Empire, 1970