This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer [Paperback]

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.

“[Holmes] does not so much write lives as haunt them; he seems to invade his subject’s dreams.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A glorious series of essays on the art of life writing. . . . Heaven for his fans [and] the best account imaginable for the richness of his form.” —The Observer

“I am a Richard Holmes addict. . . . Only Holmes, who is so deeply versed in the people and culture of eighteenth-century science, could tell these stories with such verve and resonance.”—Oliver Sacks

“Elegant. . . . Nobody has thought longer or harder about the nature of biography as a literary form than Holmes.” —Wall Street Journal

“Holmes’s style pleasingly resembles that of his fellow Englishman, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. Like that celebrated man of letters, Holmes comes across as contagiously curious, casually erudite, and just a bit daft. . . . In spending so much of his life chronicling the lives of poets, he has, to l"