The writing in this biography is really excellent. Grant doesn’t belabor things (though he does leave more to be said about select things, which I’ll get to). He characterizes Margaret, William, Sir Charles, and the rest with succinct yet pointed language. Margaret, in his view, is at times slightly ridiculous as her worst detractors see her, yet he’s compassionate about her lack of education and frequently points out the serious undertone to her character and writing. He takes her seriously, in other words, when his colleagues at the time really did not.

At times, this biography is laugh-out-loud funny. William charming his creditors, who he (I think) never pays back, to the point that they throw him a going away party – even though he has lavishly spent all their money on horses and telescopes, rather than basic necessities, which he lacked. Margaret with her many prefaces. Mrs. Evelyn and her disapproval.

I wanted to know more about Margaret, at times (ironically). For instance, Grant mentions her waiting woman, to whom Margaret writes an epistle at the beginning of her first publication, Poems and Fancies. To me, this is an extraordinary fact. They must have been close friends, right? Did this particular waiting woman travel with Margaret during the whole period of her exile? Did she help alleviate some of Margaret’s loneliness and isolation? What do we know of her, aside from the bare facts that Grant includes – that she was Margaret’s waiting woman and then later married prosperously, later to play a part in the dispensing of William’s properties? There’s more about her in Mad Madge, by Katie Whitaker.

The entire chapter about William and Margaret’s courtship I found bizarre. Grant characterizes it as a great love story. He emphasizes William’s appreciation of Margaret’s “flesh”: “Her figure was admirable, and full enough to stir Newcastle’s sensuality: ‘your plump flesh’ is a recurrent note in his praise of her person.” There’s quite a lot of discussion of William’s love poetry and other facets of William’s expression of his feelings. Yet there’s only a small, almost incidental note toward the end of the chapter about Margaret’s lack of sexual attraction for this guy who was decades older than her: “‘it was not amorous love; I never was infected therewith, it is a disease, or a passion, or both; I only know by relation, not by experience.’” And then Grant never talks about it again. ( )