This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

Richard Holmes

Mar 2017 · Satıcı: Vintage

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From the award-winning author of The Age of Wonder and Falling Upwards, here is a luminous meditation on the art of biography that fuses the author’s own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction. 

  In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime’s obsession with his Romantic subjects. It has become for him a pursuit, or pilgrimage of the heart, that 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 and tender evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and some almost lost to history: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. Holmes also investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary bard William Blake. 

  The diversity of Holmes’s material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spirit—and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. The Long Pursuit gives us a unique insider’s account of a biographer at work: traveling, teaching, researching, fantasizing, forgetting, and even ballooning. From this great chronicler of the Romantics now comes a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.

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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, was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and was one of The New York Times Book Review’s Best Books of the Year in 2009. His other books include Falling Upwards, Footsteps, Sidetracks, Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (an NBCC finalist), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the James Tait Blake Prize). Holmes is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in Great Britain.