Milton's a difficult subject for a biography. We know more about him than any other major writer of the 17th century, given his involvement in revolutionary politics and his employment as Latin Secretary by the commonwealth's Council of State. Yet so much of what we know is only the outer Milton, the public Milton – and also the persona that Milton chooses to disclose of himself in autobiographical snippets within the polemical pamphlets. Beer delivers a decent biographical presentation, and her discussion of the polemical essays is particularly valuable.

If your interest is the poetry, through, you'd be better off reading the supplementary materials in the two Norton Critical volumes because Beer's discussion of the poetry is at a fairly elementary level. ( )

I finished Anna Beer's biography with mixed feelings but an overall sense of satisfaction. I think most people would call the book "workmanlike." It isn't inspired writing.

On the other hand, Beer demonstrates restraint and circumspection about her subject--something that these days seems wholly lacking in the biography genre. Her discussion of Milton's friendship with Charles Diodati, and its homosexual undertones, for example, was a model of reasonable analysis. She maintains this tone of detached objectivity whenever she's discussing Milton's personal relationships--with his wives, his daughters, etc. She acknowledges prevailing theories about which marriages were "happy" and which weren't, what he felt or didn't feel for his daughters, but does not shy away from pointing out any evidence that contradicts the current prevailing theories (or romantic notions). She points out, for example, that John Milton's liberal "Of Education" --often used as evidence for the fact that he went above and beyond to educate his daughters--was written specifically as a program of education for boys and can hardly be seen as his views on the education of women.

Where the book really shines is in Beer's discussions of Milton's publications. It is really an intellectual, political biography of the man. Beer's primary interest is in the evolution of Milton's political philosophy, his radical individualism. And here she is very, very good. She documents every major (and most minor) publications he
wrote ("Pamphleteer" indeed!), assessing them against the political and religious climate of the times, and Milton's
own social standings and ambitions. The book is worth reading just for the chapter about Areopagitica -- Milton's
defense of free speech--alone.

This is a well-researched, if somewhat dry, biography of Milton. To be fair to Anna Beer, little is known of Milton's personal life which Beer find frustrating and makes it hard for any biographer to get close to the man behind the poems and the tracts, but Beer's solution of quoting from contemporary texts has the effect of distancing the reader from its subject. However her literary analysis of the major works is fascinating, the section on 'Paradise Lost' is particularly informative, and this is what lifts this book above the average. ( )