Linda Kelly, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997. ISBN: 1-85619-207-5 (hardback). Price: £25

A fine biography is a remarkable thing. By narrating the story of a single life, a writer enables us to speculate about the forms of subjectivity that formed an individual we might otherwise know mainly from his or her products—works of art, political speeches, or periods of institutional management. Perhaps the greatest challenge of biography is to position one's subject at the center of a particular discursive universe. If done well, not only does the figure come to seem central to his or her age but also to take a place in any of a number of further studies that might be written about the period in question. A biography's success today, from the viewpoint of scholarly readers, is determined not solely by the book's accuracy, by its author's narrative skill, nor by how many and controversial are the books' revelations about its subject. An important scholarly biography presents its subject in a way that immediately invites further detailed scholarship studying the figure's relationship with a number of themes, historical contexts, and political or aesthetic movements. Linda Kelly's Richard Brinsley Sheridan , in these terms, is undoubtedly a success and a book which, if widely read, may enrich scholarship in the period by opening a significant place for Sheridan in British cultural studies—as author, as politician, and as public figure. To read Kelly's biography of Sheridan is to round every corner of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britain and find, standing at the center of everything, "Old Sherry." Kelly's is a remarkable accomplishment when we recognize that Sheridan has often fallen through the cracks between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and between literary, theatrical, and political histories; Kelly proves Sheridan is more central than we could have imagined. Kelly, however, is too canny and experienced a biographer to make explicit claims for the importance of Sheridan. Her book might seem to some readers to sidestep the kinds of cultural analysis that could place Sheridan in a prominent place in discussions of British reaction to the French Revolution, to Ireland and Catholic emancipation, to national party politics, or to theatrical institutions and aesthetics. However, since each of these are key themes in her narration of the life of Sheridan, her book enables further consideration of the roles Sheridan—and others close to him—played in the making of British culture in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Through extensive (though unobtrusively cited) use of public and private documents, Kelly demonstrates that from Sheridan's life you can connect to almost any part of British culture of the period. The sections below examine briefly some of the most important themes touched on in Kelly's biography of Sheridan: Kelly repeatedly draws attention to Sheridan's troubled relationship with his father, Thomas. She notes her subject's childhood perception that his father neglected him (19), and traces the continued conflict between father and son through the success of The Rivals in 1775 (65) and into the early years of Sheridan's management of Drury Lane in the period just after Garrick's retirement (86). Kelly goes on to make a convincing case for interpreting Sheridan's adult character psychobiographically: that is, as in many ways a result of the complex of feelings provoked in him by his relationship with his father. Kelly quotes a comment made after Sheridan's death by his friend the Prince of Wales: "[H]e was so systematically jealous of his own honour, that he was always willing to grant what he was not willing to accept in return—favours, which might be interpreted as affecting his own independence" (103). Though Kelly never spells out the implications of this strand of Sheridan's character, …