This book traces the development of literary biography in the eighteenth century; how writers' melancholy was probed to explore the inner life. Case studies of a number of significant authors reveal the 1790s as a time of biographical experimentation. Reaction against philosophical biography led to a nineteenth-century taste for romanticized lives.

A 1959 study of the early life and work of the poet William Cowper. Dr Ryskamp's study ends where the better known part of Cowper's life begins, giving a soundly based, factual and detailed account of the early and more worldly career of the man later famous as a recluse.