A Light-Blue Stocking

Helen Deutsch

• BuyHester: The Remarkable Life of Dr Johnson’s ‘Dear Mistress’ by Ian McIntyre
  Constable, 450 pp, £25.00, November 2008, ISBN 978 1 84529 449 6

In the DNB Hester Lynch Piozzi (as they call her) is identified as a ‘writer’, but for the past two centuries she has been a heroine of old and new-fashioned marriage plots and a source of critical controversy. A brilliant conversationalist and an innovative recorder of her own life, she was dull only on the subject of her genealogy: her parents (who were cousins) were descended from Catrin of Berain, Mam Cymru (‘Mother of Wales’). Naming her is problematic. Ian McIntyre, in his imaginative and generous biography, simply omits surnames altogether. His subtitle, however, foregrounds a further complication. Hester Salusbury married first the wealthy brewer, MP, womaniser and ‘Southwark macaroni’ Henry Thrale, with whom she had 12 children, only four of whom survived, and then the Italian music master Gabriel Piozzi, for whom she pined passionately at the ripe old age of 40, and scandalised her circle by not only marrying but happily introducing him into British society. But neither man has claimed her for posterity. When a memorial to her was finally put up in 1909, it was to ‘Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale’.