This Long Pursuit

This Long Pursuit Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

First Vintage Books edition

Paperback (20 Feb 2018)

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Publisher's Synopsis

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 Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. 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.

Book information

ISBN: 9780307742346
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Imprint: Vintage Books
Pub date:
Edition: First Vintage Books edition
DEWEY: 809.93592
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 400
Weight: 363g
Height: 206mm
Width: 130mm
Spine width: 20mm