The impossible friendship; Boswell and Mrs. Thral.

Mary Hyde’s subject is the “impossible friendship” of two rival biographers of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and Hester Thrale Piozzi: their friendship with the great man for over twenty years, their apparently amicable relations until Mrs. Thrale’s second marriage to the Italian music master, then their bitter animosity. It is a movingly human story, with elements of comedy and conflict newly disclosed through revealing and hitherto unpublished letters and manuscript material. It offers new insights into the two protagonists and, indeed, into Johnson himself. The events following Johnson’s death form an important part of the narrative—the public warfare of the two in their writings about Johnson, in which, as Hyde observes, “the victory goes to Boswell, but the sympathy goes to Mrs. Piozzi.” The book includes reproductions of manuscripts and of contemporary paintings and drawings.