What does Hazlitt do to his biographers? A colourful, complex, contrary fellow, he elicits from them admiration to the point of hagiography and a baffling willingness to glide over the disturbing aspects of his character. Nearly two centuries on he manages to freeze criticism from beyond the grave like a vengeful ghost. Maybe his high-mindedness and convincing rightness about most things attract biographers who aspire to the same qualities. And he was so hated and disparaged in his own time by so many that it has only seemed natural since to rush to his defence. He did, of course, give as good as he got, only in better prose. An iconoclast himself, a little iconoclasm from his biographers would not go astray. A.C Grayling's life provides a perfectly competent introduction to Hazlitt's life and work. His great virtue is the clarity of his narrative - but it has to be said that he has hardly more interest than his predecessors in probing the contradictory nature of the man. Catherine MacDonald MacLean did better than any with Born Under Saturn, published in the 1940's, but she, too, was evasive in many respects. Hazlitt arrived as a young man from the country into the coteries of London's intellectual life in the early years of the 19th century. A passionate supporter of the revolution in France and admirer of Napoleon, full of invective about the complacencies of society and ardent about nature and art, he was soon a star of the periodical press. To many he must have appeared as the wrath of God. Certainly to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, categorised by Grayling as "the apostate poets", he increasingly did. He had admired and loved them before, but now they had changed political sides. And though his disillusion did not prevent him from championing the poetry, he attacked their new-found conservatism at every turn - "Mr Southey poet-laureate, Mr Wordsworth the exciseman, and Mr Coleridge nothing". Throughout the Romantic era, Hazlitt was the conscience of the tribe while irate, abusive and admiring letters about him flew hither and thither between the rest. Zealous, prescriptive, judgmental and betrayer in public of private confidences, he was all his life capable of treacheries towards friend as much as foe. He was feared by Byron, hurt the harmless Leigh Hunt, put the painter Northcote into a panic, because of what he wrote about them. And damaged none more than Sarah Walker, erstwhile beloved turned enemy after she rejected him, immortalised with naked contempt and pity for himself in his nonetheless fascinating and self-revealing Liber Amoris. Grayling regards the obsession with Sarah Walker, "lodging-house drudge", as a seminal episode in Hazlitt's life and probably its greatest drama. But his treatment of it is disappointing. Not only is his account of it limp, but he also ignores the possibility of illuminating the affair with a broader view, mediated by present-day feminism and psychology. Here, Sarah remains the cold-hearted flirt of Hazlitt's imagining and Hazlitt remains her victim. Another opportunity that Grayling misses is an investigation into Hazlitt's Irishness - his father was Irish by birth and upbringing - and its effects. He himself showed no particular interest in it or in Ireland; but Grayling tells us in passing the intriguing fact that his family befriended Catherine Emmet, niece of Robert Emmet, when they moved to a village near Bath, so warmly that she moved in with them and when she died left Hazlitt's sister Peggy an annuity. For the significance of that, if any, we must read between the lines. For all that he was lugubrious, moody, frustrated, and the object of vitriolic vendettas, Hazlitt could command great love and affection. He did not forgive or forget easily but his friends could. Perhaps his flaw was that, until late in life at least, he lacked self-knowledge or did not allow others his own frailties. Wordsworth's acceptance of money from the public purse angered him, but he himself married twice more for money than for love. He excoriated Sarah Walker for her "lust" while he was an habitual user of prostitutes himself. And yet, though he may not have known his own heart, it was at a less personal level indubitably in the right place.
Anne Haverty's recent novel The Far Side Of A Kiss (Chatto & Windus) gives Sarah Walker's perspective of her relationship with Hazlitt.