This Long Pursuit
Reflections of a Romantic Biographer
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
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Across three centuries, and much of Europe – “Holmes writes beautifully… A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation’ The Oldie
In this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime’s obsession with his Romantic subjects. This pursuit has taken him across three centuries, through much of Europe and into the lively company of many earlier biographers.
Central to this quest is a powerful evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and others almost lost: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft and Zélide. He investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favourite Romantics: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Coleridge, and the mad-visionary bard William Blake.
The diversity of Holmes’s material is testimony to his empathy, erudition and enquiring spirit; and at times his mischievous streak. This Long Pursuit contains Richard Holmes’s most personal and seductive writing yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Holmes's (The Age of Wonder) concluding entry in the trilogy begun with Footsteps and Sidetracks is part memoir, part biography, and part deep reflection about his own creative process as a biographer. The book is divided into three sections: "Confessions" opens with Holmes's recollections of his travels in the footsteps of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and continues on to his interest in the women scientists and scientific inventions of Coleridge's time, thoughts about memory and forgetting, and fascination with hot-air balloon rides. "Restorations" offers chapter-length biographies of five pre-20th-century women writers whom, aside from Mary Wollstonecraft, are largely forgotten, accompanied by Holmes's thoughts about earlier biographies of these subjects. "Afterlives" revisits selected episodes from the lives of John Keats, Percy Shelley, Thomas Lawrence, Coleridge, and William Blake, and considers how they, too, have been portrayed by biographers. Throughout, Holmes explores the art of biography and how biographers construct their sometimes conflicting stories about their subjects' lives. "Biography," Holmes writes, "is not merely a mode of historical enquiry. It is an act of imaginative faith." His effort is largely successful, though the book is slow-paced as he meanders from subject to subject. This elegantly written, curl-up-by-the-fire read will satisfy Holmes's prior fans and introduce new readers to his works and ideas.
