Famed lover in love with celebrity

Haus's Life and Times series provides interesting guidance on those people who are thought sellable. Alongside Alexander the Great, Bach, Beethoven, Caravaggio, Curie, Einstein and Kafka we have, for example, (Bette) Davis, Bevan, (Roger) Casement, Mosley, Welles and Wilde.

Eighteenth-century Britain is represented by Samuel Johnson and Emma Hamilton. This is a curious choice and one that Julie Peakman's book fails to justify. Instead, we have a bright and breezy tale, energetic in tone, but one that is very familiar through the work of other scholars.

Peakman argues the case for her subject's importance and pathos and makes some instructive comments about the contemporary role of women, Queen Maria Carolina of Naples providing a helpful foil for her subject, of whom a lover wrote: "Emma's passion is admiration... (she) is capable of aspiring to any line which would be celebrated."

Peakman has made good use of the Hamilton material in the British Library and has also used sources in the National Maritime Museum; and it is useful to see a list of relevant novels and films.

Peakman's perspective on Nelson is instructive, although more on the making of the latter's reputation has lately emerged from Laurence Brockliss et al in Nelson's Surgeon , a work that also,in part, covers Nelson's bequest regarding Emma.

Independent, or at least independent-minded, women have of late provided a fruitful topic for work, and some of the scholarship, such as Janet Todd's on Mary Wollstonecraft, has been first rate. Yet, as in biographies of men, there is a general tendency to exaggerate the role of the protagonist. This is seen in Peakman's book and, indeed, Amanda Foreman's commercially successful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire , which appears to have set the tone or at least the market for much material that has followed.

As long as a a profitable synergy links publicity and authorship in pursuing the careers of prominent 18th-century women, we can expect more work of this type. However, as with biographies of men, it is preferable if authors try to offer new insights or sources - but expect claims about either of them to be more prominent in the blurbs of the books than in their contents.

Jeremy Black is professor of history, Exeter University.