Tragic story of unspoken passion

Happiness for Samuel Johnson was, he said, to be "driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman, but one who could understand me and would add something to the conversation". Mrs Hester Thrale was such a woman and Johnson would indeed pass many happy hours driving about with her in different conveyances; rarely alone, it's true, as Mr Thrale and the entourage of a rich 18th-century English family went too. But would Sam and Hester have preferred to be alone? Beryl Bainbridge's new novel, According to Queeney, is about Johnson and Mrs Thrale and their long, tender, intimate but ultimately disappointing friendship - one Sam said gave him the happiest times in his tragic life.

The novel opens when Sam is enduring one of his bouts of a melancholia near to madness and the Thrales arrive to carry him off to their country house in Streatham to be looked after. He had been their dinner guest before - they are a young couple distinguished only by their wealth who his literary friends regard as no more than celebrity-collectors.

But with their generous gesture they showed they cared not just for Johnson's wit and learning but for himself as well.

We see him inserted into the Thrale menage, their various houses and expeditions - they take him to France, he takes them to visit his childhood haunts in Lichfield - a welcome escape from his own complicated domestic life. His house in Bolt Court is filled with a warring little tribe of dependants, from his old inamorata, the blind Mrs Williams, to Hodge the cat.

At Streatham his room is always ready, and there are lavish dinners. Mr Thrale, the brewer, and Sam, the great man of letters, share an interest in prodigious eating. There are guests who please him such as Fanny Burney and Oliver Goldsmith - and some who don't, such as Baretti, Italian teacher to Queeney, the eldest Thrale child. Maybe Baretti too loves Mrs Thrale - she is inclined to engage as live-in teachers men to whom she is romantically drawn. Sam himself fondly instructs Queeney in geography and any other subject under the sun that occurs to him. Queeney is as cool about him as she is about everyone else, with the exception of her Papa.

The narrative is regularly cut with letters about her childhood from the adult Queeney to a Miss Hawkins who is seeking information for the book she is writing about the Johnson circle.

The Queeney we find in the letters is limited in perspective, biased against her mother and usually wrong in her interpretation of events. As a commentary, the letters reflect the theme of the book, the dark inescapable currents of egotism and misunderstanding which condition human relations and result in sadness and bitterness .

Mrs Thrale is at the centre of all desires - Queeney's, her husband's to a degree, and of course Johnson's, while her own desires are frustrated. She loves Queeney but fails to make her believe it. She likes her good-natured husband only mildly but is continually and lovelessly pregnant. Her numerous infants die more often than not. In a beautifully imagined scene, at dinner one night she is disturbed by the far-off sound of a baby crying and Queeney coldly remarks: "There is no infant in the house, they are all dead."

She feels deeply for Johnson's sudden melancholies and fears but comes to believe that he's heartless, doesn't understand her and wants only his dinners and a carriage at his disposal. She is seen by posterity as the woman who broke Johnson's heart. Bainbridge resuscitates her as a woman whose own heart was badly fractured by grief but remained brave and optimistic, obeying Johnson's dictum to take refuge in her "accustomed entertainments".

As for Sam, the eccentric shambling moody oddity, Bainbridge manages to evoke both his lovableness and genius. His passion stays unspoken - though to speak it would probably have been little use - and by the end he pines for the carriage which does not come. Everyone, indeed, suffers their sorrows in silence. Bainbridge is wonderfully subtle on the sad, attritional, secretly tragic process of life, a world where everyone is washed by the mild pallor of a Georgian sun and only Mrs Thrale seeks the flame.

Anne Haverty's novel The Far Side Of A Kiss was recently published in paperback by Vintage