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This long pursuit : reflections of a romantic biographer

Holmes, Richard, 1945- author

Overview

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 Shelley's death at sea, Mary Wollstonecraft's paramours, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 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 Holmes's 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 Holmes's acclaimed books.

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Subject: Holmes, Richard, 1945- / Authors, English Biography History and criticism. / Biographers Great Britain Biography. / Biography as a literary form. / Romanticism Great Britain.
• ISBN: 9780307742346, 0307742342

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Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
PR6058.O455 Z465 2018	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE