William Hayley has been dead for nearly 200 years
He wasn’t a very good poet.
You’ve probably never heard of him.
It’s not much of a pitch, is it?

So why should you help me write his biography?
Because it’s a great story and a story that deserves to be told: a rollicking, tragi-comic costume-drama of passionate friendships, impetuous proposals, literature of variable quality, death and madness, that features a cast of leading eighteenth century artists, writers and other notables.

William Cowper, William Blake and William Pitt all feature at various points in William Hayley’s extraordinary life, as do George Romney, Emma, Lady Hamilton, John Flaxman, Anna Seward, Joseph Wright of Derby and Amelia Opie. Not to mention two wives, a semi-literate French governess, an electric shock machine, an accidental stabbing, a best-selling self-help book in rhyming couplets, A Philosophical, Historical and Moral Essay on Old Maids, early deaths, astonishing recoveries, personal tragedy and all the ups and downs of professional triumph and humiliation.

What makes it different from a standard literary biography?
Hayleyworld isn’t only the eventful life story of a once-influential and now all-but forgotten individual. It’s about the world he lived in. It will explore the Culture of Sensibility: a society in which men hugged dramatically, wept like cartoon characters and writers used too many exclamation marks. It’s about fame and its aftermath, medicine and mental health, relations between men and women, artists and writers, parents and children. It’s about how we decide which works of literature are worth reading and which people are worth remembering; about how we value ourselves and each other.

Alongside the contemporary images you’d expect to find in a biography like this, it’ll feature a handful of stunning original illustrations by multi-award-winning costume and set designer Katrina Lindsay, whose work includes a 2008 Tony for Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Damon Albarn's Dr Dee, the West End Cabaret and costumes for Terry Gilliam’s Faust at ENO.

How long will it take?
About a year to research and write. I’ll be visiting the British Library in Euston, The Bodleian in Oxford, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Yale and Princeton in the US, as well as visiting Hayley's haunts and will post regular updates. To do this I need your help and patronage.

So please join me on my journey and in my shed as I time-travel back to the eighteenth century and meet William Hayley, his family and, of course, his many friends…

Read more...

I’m the author of Friends: Why Men & Women are From the Same Planet (Bloomsbury 2004) and Stage Mum (Hutchinson 2008, Arrow 2009) and the editor of Bricks Without Mortar: the selected poems of Hartley Coleridge (Picador, 2000). I’ve been obsessed with William Hayley since the mid-1990s, when I started an MA in Literature and Politics 1776-1832 and one of my tutors described him as ‘a man who went round looking after mad poets and artists’.

I write about books and digital literature for the Independent on Sunday, make video podcasts for a National Health Service agency, am working on a feature for BBC Radio 3 and co-writing a musical. I live in Harlesden, north-west London with my twelve-year-old daughter, two cats and more mess than is really healthy.