style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">There are, conventionally speaking, three ages of modern biography: Romantic, Boring and Today’s. According to this crude tripartite map, Samuel Johnson’s Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744) was the first true example of a form that ripened swiftly in 1791 with Boswell’s monumental study of Johnson himself. Such endeavours were undertaken in a spirit of potent free inquiry, and the biographer’s subjectivity was acknowledged within the narrative. This first phase culminated in William Godwin’s biography of his late wife Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), and William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris (1823), both still much-read and referred to today.