His magnetism and ambition attracted some of the greatest acting talents of the day, including Mrs Siddons and Kemble. Yet the finances of the place were chaotic, quarrels among the players were endemic, and many good minutes were wasted keeping creditors happy. It would be wrong to think of these things as examples of simply average theatre-muddle. They reflect the fact that as Sheridan worked to change the world around him – the world of taste, as well as the world of power – so he exaggerated his own lack of belonging.After Elizabeth’s early death, Sheridan soon married again, and began recreating the same pattern: he and his second wife were initially happy, then he betrayed her once too often, then she looked for solace elsewhere, then they reunited in affectionate anguish.

It has more to do with the feeling that, even while speaking for new kinds of self-consciousness and self-awareness in civic life, he depended on old ideas of structure and the self in private. For all his devotion to urgent contemporary issues: opposing the Seditious Meetings Bill and the Treasonable Practices Bill, decrying Warren Hastings – he always seems to have one foot in an earlier epoch. This is not just because we cannot easily forget his life as a playwright. For the man himself, the early successes mattered less than the mature battlings – and Kelly lets us see why, generally by design, sometimes inadvertently. As a literary critic she is plain to the point of being dull (“there is a warmth and optimism in [School for Scandal] which brings it naturally to its happy ending”). As a political reporter she is assiduous and happily relaxed. From the day Sheridan aligns himself with Fox and is appointed Secretary to the Treasury, in 1783, until losing his seat as the Member for Stafford shortly before his death in 1816, she guides us expertly through the complexities of domestic policy, and shrewdly relates them to the threats posed by the French Revolution and the long war in Europe.Our sense of Sheridan’s dislocation becomes gradually sharper.

His three great plays, The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777) and The Critic (1779), his comic opera The Duena (1775), and his taking over the artistic and business management of the Drury Lane theatre from Garrick – all these things made him the darling of the literary salons. From there it was a short step to a different kind of power-base: the drawing room of Devonshire House, where Whig politicians were quick to welcome an ally of such charisma and conviction.Because his plays are still loved, because he is buried in Poet’s Corner, and because even the most sparkling political speeches become an acquired taste after 200 years, Sheridan’s theatrical reputation burns more brightly than memories of his life in Parliament. At the same time, he created a brittle but valuable social probity. It was the first time – and by no means the last – that his private behaviour seemed at odds with his public sympathies, especially in so far as his treatment of women was concerned. On the other hand, it seems that Elizabeth was happy with her new life, even if it meant beginning a round of child-bearing which eventually brought her to an early grave.Sheridan, now given a clear run at the stage himself, soon and brilliantly solved their financial problems.

In the early 1770s, when Sheridan’s father had installed his brood in Bath, they became entangled with the Linleys, a family of phenomenal musical talents. The elder daughter Elizabeth, who later sat for two portraits by Reynolds, was beautiful, sweet-voiced and golden- natured – and lasciviously pursued by a dastardly Captain Mathews. The young Sheridan sprang to her rescue, spirited her off to France promising that his intentions were purely platonic, then changed his tune and swore undying love. Two duels later, and after a storm of parental disapproval, they married.Although Sheridan knew that he could have lived comfortably off the proceeds of his wife’s singing, he chose to observe the rules of polite society, and forbade her to perform. More than that, it focused a sympathy with outsiders, and with Catholic outsiders in particular, which became the wellspring of his genius as a writer and the engine of his activities in Parliament. Once the family moved to England, Sheridan’s early experience at Harrow confirmed everything he already knew.