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|title=Wits and Wives: Dr Johnson in the Company of Women

|author=Kate Chisholm

|publisher=Pimlico

|date=November 2012

|summary=A wise and witty new biography of Dr Johnson that examines how the great man was influenced by the women in his life.

}}

What's your mental image of a Great Writer? Most people would probably say the same thing: someone sitting in splendid isolation, probably in a garret, writing Great Words and hating them. The idea of Great Writers having friends, or even a family, is a bizarre one. Partly this is because most Great Writers were incredibly weird people. But there's another issue at play. We're simply not used to imagining them in context, just one small part of a large and busy world. Our notion of biography is an incredibly fragmented one: despite the fact that one of the best indications of someone's character is how they interact with other human beings, we expect biographers to essentially confine themselves to the person and their literary output.