Hester, by Ian McIntyre
‘I must eat up my own heart & be quiet,’ confided Hester Thrale in her private notebook in the autumn of 1777. She was pregnant again, for the 11th time in 13 years. By then seven of her children had died, including her only and much loved son, and she was convinced that this child, too, would be taken from her. She had much to bewail. But Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi was indefatigable of spirit and merciless in her opinions. ‘Quiet’ was something she could never be — fortunately for us. When she died in 1821, aged 80, she left behind six large volumes of ‘loose thoughts, or casual hints, dropped by eminent men’ plus thousands of letters, as well as a number of published works including her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson and two volumes of her endearing, sometimes frosty, always insightful, correspondence with Dr Johnson. Fanny Burney, the novelist and diarist, remarked to her sister, ‘She is a most dear Creature, but never restrains her Tongue in any thing’.
It’s very odd, then, that in this great age of biography and women’s studies there’s been no major book about her since William McCarthy’s literary portrait of 1985. Hester was one of the trio of women who lived in domestic comfort with the great dictionary-maker and essayist, and knew him intimately. But unlike his mother and his wife she alone ventured into print, giving us the Johnson she knew as an endlessly fascinating but sometimes impossible house-guest. While he described her as a rattlesnake ‘for many have felt your Venom, few have escap’d your Attractions, and all the world knows you have the Rattle’, she told him ‘he most resembled an Elephant whose Weight would crush the Crocodile, & whose Proboscis could from its Force and Ductility either lift up the Buffalo or pick up the Pin’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in