Michael Franklin brings Hester Piozzi's Welsh heritage to the fore in this biography and, in detailed and incisive analyses of her works, examines the relationship between Piozzi's identity as a “Welshwoman” and her literary output (63).1 Drawing on a wide range of Piozzi's published writings and manuscript materials, Franklin makes an insightful contribution in an increasingly vibrant field of scholarship on Piozzi's life and work, intervening in discourses concerning national and cultural identities, politics, gender, and literary genre.In 1741, Hester Lynch Salusbury was born at Bodvel Hall, “three miles west of Pwllheli” (1). Her parents, John Salusbury of Bachegraig and Lleweni, and Hester Maria Lynch Cotton of Combermere, could claim “aristocratic Welsh blood” because “both descended from Catrin of Berain” (ix, 3). Throughout his chronologically structured biography, Franklin maintains that Piozzi was “a Welshwoman to the core and was proud to attribute all those characteristics . . . to what she had imbibed at her Caernarfonshire hearth and home” (63). Franklin claims that Piozzi's Welsh identity is not only apparent from her ancestry, but also attributes her characteristics and personality to a distinctive Celtic heritage. Piozzi is depicted as possessing a “wild, mercurial, and somewhat meretricious charm,” which Franklin states is a “stereotypical ‘Celtic’” characteristic that sits in opposition to a “rational English” identity (118). While Franklin shows Piozzi to have a “characteristic patience,” she is also an “Iron Lady,” actuated by her desire to please and perform, and it is these “characteristics,” acquired during her upbringing in Caernarfonshire and then at Lleweni Hall in Denbighshire, Franklin argues, that provided the foundation of Piozzi's literary career (48, 67). Although Franklin reflects that such qualities eventually enabled Piozzi to “support Samuel Johnson” selflessly, the overall thrust of his account of Piozzi is to decenter her association with Johnson (63). While Johnson remains an important influence on Piozzi's life and works, Franklin encourages the reader to view her instead as an original, independent author and intellectual. William McCarthy's seminal study, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman (1985), as Franklin acknowledges, was the first convincingly to refute “the idea that Hester's literary career was entirely dependent on the commanding influence of Samuel Johnson” (15). However, by concentrating on a Welsh identity Piozzi acquired long before her association with Johnson, Franklin nuances McCarthy's insight, claiming yet greater autonomy for Piozzi's life and works.While recent scholarship has focused on the literary output of Piozzi's later years, Franklin effectively narrates the first twenty-one years of Piozzi's life, attending to the development of those traits which were to be the bedrock of her literary career. Extracting anecdotes from Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (1861), compiled by Abraham Hayward, Franklin emphasizes the significance of the illustrious acquaintances Piozzi made in her youth. He describes, for instance, “the celebrated artist William Hogarth, an intimate friend of her father,” joining “Hester and her cousins in playing the board Game of the Goose” (8). As a child in the 1740s, Piozzi “captivated the Duke and Duchess of Leeds, honing her performance skills while fed dramatic lines and delicious sweetmeats on David Garrick's lap, and being taught Satan's speech to the sun from Paradise Lost by James Quin, England's leading actor” (4). Perhaps most importantly, Franklin claims, “Earlier lessons learnt at Lleweni Hall and practised to perfection on Sir Robert Cotton ensured success as Hester now exerted her charm upon Sir Thomas and Lady Anna Salusbury” (6). Subsequently, Lady Salusbury grew to love Hester “as her own Daughter and destined Heiress” and arranged for Hester to receive tuition from Arthur Collier (7). Collier “championed female education,” and his conversation, Franklin argues, “was good practice” for Piozzi's later participation in literary circles where she would converse with the likes of Johnson and Elizabeth Montagu (9). In exploring these acquaintances, Franklin deftly proves that the connections Piozzi forged in her youth inspired and encouraged her, enabling her, over time, to cultivate her own literary identity.By the time Piozzi married Henry Thrale in 1763, she had already spent much time residing in London and at Offley Park in Hertfordshire. The amount of time Piozzi spent living outside of Wales might be expected to present an obstacle to Franklin's case for a distinctly Welsh identity. Indeed, Franklin shows that Piozzi's identity as a Welsh writer “concerned with achieving literary fame” became eclipsed by her new identities as a wife and mother (15). Whereas, in the early chapters, he depicted Piozzi as the performative, aspiring writer, Franklin shows that after marriage, “She did not seem to be in control of her own life or her own body” (29). The “Children's Book or rather Family Book” was a diary Piozzi kept from 1766 to 1768, and a project Johnson encouraged in order “to link reproduction and production by recording her daughter's physical and intellectual growth.” The book “subsequently served as an intimate diary to which she [Piozzi] confided her pent-up feelings” (39). Franklin's attention to Piozzi's personal writings, such as the “Family Book” and Thraliana, accords Piozzi agency during a period in her life when she was “totally mastered by two despotic personalities,” those of her husband and mother (26).Interestingly, Franklin also shows that it was London, and its fashionable society, that offered a space for Piozzi to display her inherent Welsh spirit. In the chapter entitled “Hester Brewster, or, ‘Women Have a Manifest Advantage over Men in the Doing Business,’” Franklin describes how, in 1768, the “resourceful Hester” wrote advertisements in support of her husband's electoral campaign, and in 1772, when Thrale faced bankruptcy, she was “drawn into taking an active managerial role in the family business” (55). London also offered Piozzi the opportunity to participate in more formal intellectual gatherings, such as those of the Bluestocking set, and eventually to establish her own salon at Streatham Park. While readers may be well familiar with the Bluestocking salon and the coterie at Streatham Park, Franklin presents a new account of Piozzi's social participation in salon culture. As “the world came to Streatham,” Piozzi's salon soon rivaled established “gatherings hosted by Frances Boscawen or Elizabeth Vesey” (38, 80). The salon, Franklin argues, offered a chance for Piozzi to put her “Celtic theatricality” (81) to use. He shows that these spaces were not only important because they provided Piozzi with intellectual and creative connections and inspiration, but also because the salon was an environment in which Piozzi's Welsh “hwyl” thrived (31).2Franklin punctuates the biography with extracts of Piozzi's prose and verse, which not only reveals the variety of her writing but also offers significant biographical insight. This is particularly evident in Piozzi's “best known poem,” “The Three Warnings: A Tale,” which first appeared in Anna Williams's Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1766) and was “widely reprinted throughout the century in popular anthologies, miscellanies, chapbooks, and prints” (36). Franklin observes in his reading of the poem that “the fate of her [Piozzi's] baby, who had given up her life so placidly, as well as the declining health of her mother and uncle, had encouraged this poem's clear-eyed focus upon death” (34–35). Franklin also does justice to Piozzi's intellectual interests by emphasizing the variety of her own reading and her commentary on the literature she read. He suggests, for instance, that “Hester's fascination with all-female communities” in Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy, and Germany (1798) was founded on her reading of Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1696–97), Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753), and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762), and it was, in Piozzi's words, her reading of Joseph Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756) that “made a Writer & Critic of H:L:P” (73, 15).3In addition to the wealth of extracts from diaries, letters, marginalia, and verse, Franklin also provides generous introductions to Piozzi's most significant publications (all following her marriage to Gabriel Piozzi), including Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson (1786), Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson (1788), Observations and Reflections (1798), British Synonymy (1794), and Retrospection (1801). Franklin's commentary on the critical reception of Piozzi's works provides useful introductory material and helps to contextualize these publications in the late eighteenth-century marketplace. For instance, the European Magazine and London Review mounted a “sustained attack” on Retrospection, “pronouncing that ‘female vanity never set itself forth more conspicuously not [sic] more absurdly, than in the assumption of universal knowledge which runs through the whole compilation’” (153). Franklin's detailed analyses of the texts provide original insight for new readers as well as for those already familiar with Piozzi's literary productions. Refreshingly, for example, in his account of the critical reception of Anecdotes, Franklin does not dwell on the well-rehearsed dissension between Piozzi and rival biographer James Boswell. Instead, Franklin again places Piozzi within the larger context of women writers dominating the literary marketplace in the period. It is Piozzi's “literary creativity” in these works, Franklin states, that reflects “not just a personal coming of age, but also the flowering of her whole generation” (102).Franklin's close readings consistently explain Piozzi's cultivation of a Welsh literary identity, best seen in the content and style of her major works. He observes that throughout British Synonymy, Piozzi stresses her Welsh heritage, picturing “herself as the eloquent Welsh author who . . . can ornament the English tongue through her compositions” (125). Franklin's examination of the style of Observations and Reflections, the publication that he argues best depicts Piozzi emerging “out of Johnson's shadow,” reveals her articulating a “Welsh-British identity” and celebrating “cultural diversity” (117, 102). In her diary, Frances Burney connects the style of Piozzi's travelogue with her character: “How like herself, how characteristic is every line! Wild, entertaining, flighty, inconsistent, and clever!” (118). Franklin reflects that the “wild, mercurial and somewhat meretricious charm” that Burney sees “draws on stereotypical ‘Celtic’ characteristics” (118).A valuable and comprehensive resource for students and scholars, Franklin's Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi is an ambitious and thoughtful account, which, through a sustained concentration on Welsh cultural identity, produces new readings of Piozzi's works. His perceptive analysis of both major published texts and private writings provides a nuanced understanding of the influence that Welsh heritage, culture, and assumed national characteristics had on Piozzi's innovative and experimental literary and critical oeuvre. This biography contributes significantly to ongoing work that recognizes Piozzi as an author and intellectual in her own right. Franklin shows that Piozzi was not simply a writer born in Wales, but also a compelling Welsh writer who sought to establish herself at the forefront of a generation of women writers.