Bibliograph

This long pursuit, reflections of a romantic biographer, Richard Holmes

Type

Label

This long pursuit, reflections of a romantic biographer, Richard Holmes

Language

eng

resource.biographical

autobiography

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

This long pursuit

Oclc number

963230667

Responsibility statement

Richard Holmes

Sub title

reflections of a romantic biographer

Summary

In this chronicle of his lifelong obsession with discovering, assembling, and re-creating the lives of writers and scientists, Richard Holmes here casts a new eye not only on the Romantic poets and lost women of Romantic science he has long studied, including Margaret Cavendish and Mary Somerville, but on their biographers, as well. He examines the evolution of the myths that have overshadowed certain lives (Percy Shelleys death at sea, Mary Wollstonecrafts paramours, Samuel Taylor Coleridges opium-fueled lectures), and reveals how the manner in which each generation tells the stories of the lives that came before it shapes and is shaped by a contemporary understanding of human nature. These colorful portraits are deftly woven together with Holmess own experience as a biographer, giving us the rare privilege of observing a master at work. An altogether spellbinding examination of the nature of biographical knowledge, brimming with the infectious curiosity that has characterized all of Holmess acclaimed books

Table Of Contents

Part I. Confessions -- Travelling -- Experimenting -- Teaching -- Forgetting -- Ballooning -- Part II. Restorations -- Margaret Cavendish -- Zélide -- Madame de Staël -- Mary Wollstonecraft -- Mary Somerville -- Part III. Afterlives -- John Keats the well-beloved -- Shelley undrowned -- Thomas Lawrence revarnished -- Coleridge misremembered -- William Blake rediscovered

Classification