Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes, Richard Holmes (Introduction)

Overview

Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure." Expelled from college, disowned by his aristocratic father, driven from England, Shelley led a life marked from its beginning to its early end by a violent rejection of society; he embraced rebellion and disgrace without thought of the cost to himself or to others. Here we have the real Shelley—radical agitator, atheist, apostle of free love, but above all a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator, whose life and work have proved an essential inspiration to poets as varied as W.B. Yeats and Allen Ginsberg.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590170373
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	05/31/2003
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Edition description:	New Introduction
Pages:	880
Sales rank:	1,080,185
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.96(h) x 1.73(d)

About the Author

Richard Holmes is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit (published by NYRB Classics), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year award; Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize; and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, which won the 1990 Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award. His other works include Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. He is also a professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Table of Contents

	Preface to the New Edition	ix
	Introduction	xiii
1	A Fire-Raiser	1
2	Oxford: 1810-11	37
3	Wales and Limbo: 1810	61
4	Harriet Westbrook	84
5	Irish Revolutionaries: 1812	117
6	A Radical Commune	133
7	The Tan-yr-allt Affair	163
8	One Dark Night	178
9	A Poem and a Wife: Queen Mab 1813	199
10	Three for the Road: Europe 1814	235
11	Bad Dreams: Kentish Town 1814	250
12	Up the River: Bishopsgate 1815	286
13	The Byron Summer: Switzerland 1816	319
14	The Suicides: London 1816	347
15	The Garden Days: Marlow 1817	367
16	The Platonist: Bagni di Lucca 1818	414
17	An Evening with Count Maddalo: Venice	439
18	The Tombs of Naples: 1818	458
	Appendix to Chapter 18	481
19	A Roman Spring: 1819	485
20	The Palace of the Dark	509
21	The Hothouse: Livorno 1819	519
22	The West Wind: Florence 1819	529
23	From the Gallery: Florence 1820	560
24	The Reformer: Pisa 1820	571
25	The Moons of Pisa: 1820	602
26	The Tuscan Set: 1821	617
27	The Colony: 1821	654
28	The Byron Brigade: 1822	685
29	The Gulf of Spezia	712
30	Coda	730
	Author's Acknowledgements	734
	Bibliography	736
	New Select Bibliography	739
	References	741
	Index	792