The one thing everyone knows about Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883) is that he translated Omar Khayyam. Which makes you picture him, knowing nothing else about him, as a Burton-like figure crossing deserts on his camel and smoking a hookah. So it's a bit of a shock to discover that the person responsible for bringing the glass-of-wine-beneath-the-boughness of the Orient into so many British and American readers' lives was neither a traveller nor a serious scholar, but actually lived a relatively reclusive life, most of it in rural Suffolk, dabbling in this and that as the fancy took him. He didn't produce any other significant published works apart from the Omar Khayyam translations during his lifetime, but he was one of the great letter-writers of an age of great letter-writers, and had a voluminous correspondence with all sorts of interesting people, not least Thackeray, Alfred and Frederick Tennyson, Fanny Kemble and the Carlyles.

FitzGerald's life seems to have been shaped to a great extent by his uncomfortable relationship with the very wealthy family he was born into: his inherited wealth made it unnecessary for him ever to think about a serious career, but he was clearly embarrassed by his mother's conspicuous consumption and his father's disastrous business ventures, staying away from his relatives as much as he decently could and spending as little as possible on himself, eating simply and going to considerable lengths to avoid making work for his servants.

FitzGerald's sexuality is obviously something of a puzzle, but Martin seems somewhat over-fastidious in his refusal to draw any conclusions at all. If you put together the evidence of a string of intense, possessive friendships with men from outside his own social and intellectual circle, a tendency to pick up fishermen, an obvious lack of interest in women, and a brief and disastrous attempt at marriage rather late in life, it seems to be pretty obvious which way FitzGerald was inclined. From his friends' reactions when he told them about his plans to marry Miss Barton, it's clear that - even in an age where there was no socially acceptable discourse for talking about homosexuality - they had drawn their own conclusions. Martin also hints that the Lowestoft fishermen were joking openly about his motives for hanging about the port. There's also the telling observation that whilst the poet's love-objects in Omar Khayyam's original text are sometimes male and sometimes female, FitzGerald avoids specifying any genders at all in his translations. Hmm.

Martin gives a very clear, amused yet affectionate account of FitzGerald's life, avoiding drowning us in facts and quotations, but doing a good job of explaining his strange, elusive character to us and showing us why he thinks him worthy of our attention. The bad news is that reading this book isn't going to get me out of reading the letters as well... ( )