Kirjahaku

To read the journals she kept from the age of sixteen is to step back into Georgian England, meeting Dr Johnson, Garrick and Reynolds, being chased round the gardens of Kew Palace by the King. it paints a vivid portrait of a woman of great talent, against the changing background of England and France, a culture and an age.

Dr Johnson is often thought of as a strident, overbearing conversationalist, a man who famously asserted that 'Women have all the liberty they should wish to have'. She proposes that the heart of the man, the truth of his character, can more clearly be seen via his many - close, generous, equal - relationships with women.