For sixteen years, Hester Thrale kept the greatest man of her age from losing his mind.
Wife to a brewer who did not love her, mother to a nursery she kept burying, she ran the most brilliant table in England - Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Boswell hovering with his notebook - and at its head sat Samuel Johnson, the great rolling ruin of a man who feared his own reason the way other men fear the dark. He put the lock of that reason into her hands and begged her never to let it swing open, and for sixteen years she held it.
To Please Myself is the story of the woman who held the key: of what it cost her to be everyone's keeper and no one's beloved; of Gabriel Piozzi, the Italian music-master she was forbidden to love; and of the day she chose at last - against Johnson, against her children, against the whole of her world - to please herself, and let the great man go.
Drawn from Thraliana, from Johnson's own letters, and from the strange true record of a padlock, this is a novel of duty and genius, of the women history keeps in its margins, and of the terrible cost of being needed.
