Perhaps no biographer of the late eighteenth century knew more about the “innumerable wants and perplexities” of the genre than did William Hayley. The lives he chose to memorialise, including his own, were deeply controversial and morally problematic. Rehabilitating the image of the regicide John Milton was a courageous task during the revolutionary 1790s while discussion of William Cowper’s mental illness was a perilous topic for Cowper’s relatives at the court of George 111. Loyal to his biographical data and his subjects, Hayley persevered. The difficulties faced by a biographer today trying to piece together the hitherto unexplored relationship between Hayley and Jane Austen are of a different order. They comprise a jigsaw of silences and suppressions which require the assembling of interlocking contexts through which details begin to fit together and reveal a startling new picture.