This Long Pursuit
Reflections of a Romantic Biographer
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
‘A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation’ Oldie
In this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes travels across three centuries, through much of Europe and into the lively company of many earlier biographers.
Central to this pursuit 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 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 at times his mischievous streak. This is his most personal and seductive writing yet.
Reviews
‘A must read … intriguing and satisfying … All the sketches makes illuminating reading, in many cases deliberately setting out to provoke a rethink of earlier biographies … I thoroughly enjoyed the book; indeed I devoured it’ Athene Donald, Guardian
‘Compulsive, fastidious journey through 50 years of his own notebooks … Holmes gives an insight into his methods’, Books of the Year, Observer
‘A glorious series of essays on the art of life writing and a worthy successor to his earlier volumes on the craft, Footsteps and Sidetracks … heaven for Holmes fans … the best account imaginable for the richness of his form’ Observer
‘This collection of 50 years of high-profile lectures and anthology contributions offers us a lorryload of arresting subjects … ‘This Long Pursuit’ is distinguished by a geniality of tone … Holmes's eye for detail is as sharp as ever’ The Times
‘Holmes writes beautifully of the perils of memory and forgetting … perhaps the essay that best sums up Holmes's endeavour is his superb explosion of the accepted account of Coleridge's 1808 lectures to the Royal Institution … a masterly performance by … the greatest literary biographer of his generation’ The Oldie
About the author
Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of the ten New York Times’ Best Books of the Year in 2009. His balloon book, Falling Upwards, was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by seven newspapers in 2013. His other biographies include Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the 1974 Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Duff Cooper Prize), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Prize). This Long Pursuit completes the autobiographical trilogy begun in Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 2010. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization for sustained achievement in biography. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.
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.
