This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

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 authorâ€™s own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction.Â

Â In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetimeâ€™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 StaÃ«l, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual ZÃ©lide. 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.Â

Â The diversity of Holmesâ€™s material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spiritâ€”and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. The Long Pursuit gives us a unique insiderâ€™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.
Country USA
Brand Pantheon
Manufacturer Pantheon
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 030737968X
ReleaseDate 2017-03-07
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780307379689

Country	USA
Brand	Pantheon
Manufacturer	Pantheon
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	030737968X
ReleaseDate	2017-03-07
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780307379689