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This Long Pursuit

Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

Richard Holmes
In this ‘inside account of a biographer at work’, the renowned biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, Richard Holmes, reflects upon the principles that have guided his work, his life and his ‘strange, unappeased sense of some continuous, intense and inescapable pursuit’. He goes on exploring the art of biography through essays on five women, Margaret Cavendish, Zélide, Madame de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Somerville, and the ‘afterlives’ of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake and the painter Thomas Lawrence.
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Product information:
  • Publisher: William Collins
  • Year: 2017
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368pp
  • Illustrated: Yes
  • Dimensions: 198x129mm
  • ISBN: 9780008168728
  • Condition: New
  • Weight: 0.3kg
Product code:
505897
Product information
Full publisher description
'A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation' Oldie
In this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes travels across three centuries, through much of Europe and into the lively company of many earlier biographers.


Central to this pursuit is a powerful evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and others almost lost: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft and Zelide. He investigates the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Coleridge, and the mad-visionary bard William Blake.


The diversity of Holmes's material is testimony to his empathy, erudition and at times his mischievous streak. This is his most personal and seductive writing yet.
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