This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

Richard Holmes's luminous meditation on the art of biography explores the fascinating relationship between fact and fiction through his own personal experience as a biographer. Ranging widely over art, science, and poetry, Holmes describes a pilgrimage of the heart that has taken him across three centuries. He powerfully evokes the lives of women both scientific and literary: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Sta l, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Z lide. Holmes investigates the reductive myths that have overshadowed some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the opium-soaked Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary William Blake. This great chronicler of the Romantics has produced a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 02/20/2018
ISBN: 9780307742346
Pages: 400
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 0.90d