SOURCE: "Finger Posts," in The Female Imagination, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975, pp. 197-207.

In the following excerpt, Spacks focuses on Piozzi's Thraliana and concludes that the work's literary merit "is its vivid revelation of a woman's psychology. "

The eleven hundred pages of text in Hester Thrale's Thraliana have attracted the attention mostly of those interested in people other than the author. Rich in varied anecdotes about Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Fanny Burney and her father, they provide a capsule social history of middle-class life in the second half of the eighteenth century. They also compose an intricate self-portrait, probably more revealing than the author intended. Despite its voluminousness, this verbal portrait has something in common with the Duchess' miniature: Mrs. Thrale, too, suffered from conflicting desires to conceal and to reveal herself; more openly than her predecessor, she exposes her rage. "Denied a real testing ground" (a condition my students...