Lady Caroline Lamb's seduction by Lord Byron's Childe Harold cost her both marriage and mental health; Laura Riding, claiming she was poetry incarnate, leapt from a fourth-storey building; Robert Graves, believing she was right, followed. Why do some writers compel their readers to sacrifice all on the strength of a few words? In attempting to answer this question, Literary Seductions examines tales of literary love affairs which went one step further - of readers who give up everything for writers and their work.