McIntyre himself had a massive amount of material to embroider, edit and rearrange - Hester's copious life-long journal Thraliana and the six volumes of her published letters just for a start. He devotes half his book to her life with Piozzi, which involves a lot of travelogue, made readable by her lively judgments on places, people and current events as she moves between the continent, Bath and her family home in Wales. This second half also documents the hostility of her neglected daughters. No one at the time, however, saw anything untoward in abandoning young girls for years on end to paid minders. She had two more quasi-maternal passions, the first for a nephew of Piozzi's, on whom she lavished inordinate amounts of sentimental correspondence, property - and money, which was all he wanted from her. Her last attachment was for an actor called Conway, whom she subjected to a "rolling barrage" of outrageously affectionate letters to which he had neither the skill nor the inclination to respond.

McIntyre's biography is illuminated by the extraordinary vitality of this tiny, plump woman, who engineered passionate attachments as an outlet for her energies and who would rush into the freezing sea for a bathe in her eighties. She was always the life and soul of the party, and the heroine of her own story.

The notorious Lady Worsley was only eight years younger than Hester. Theirs was a very racy generation. As her subtitle suggests, Hallie Rubenhold's Lady Worsley's Whim is a well-researched romp. In 1782 Sir Richard Worsley, MP and Privy Counsellor, sued his wife's lover Maurice Bissett for criminal conversation, which means adultery. The "lurid sexual details" revealed in court hit the headlines. "The country gossiped about it for months while the newspapers hounded and lampooned its protagonists." Rubenhold's reconstruction of the "sordid history" of the marriage is largely garnered from the court reports, from "Grub Street drivel" and from the "obscene trash" of scandal sheets.

Lady Worsley, née Fleming, married Sir Richard when she was 18. He had an estate on the Isle of Wight. The next-door estate belonged to Bissett, who became the intimate friend of both parties. Lady W had a daughter by Bissett, who was accepted by Sir Richard as his own. Sir Richard, we gather, liked watching. He was a voyeur.

With the threat of French invasion, there was a mustering of 15,000 troops at Coxheath in Kent, among them Sir Richard's South Hampshire Militia. Lady W joined the vast undisciplined encampment, like all the other WAGs, and Bissett came too. One day, she went into Maidstone, to the baths. Her husband invited Bissett to stand on his shoulders and leer through a high window at Lady W emerging from her bath, to the delectation of all three.