This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

by Richard Holmes

Overview

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 author’s own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction. 

  In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime’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 Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. 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. 

  The diversity of Holmes’s material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spirit—and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. The Long Pursuit gives us a unique insider’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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307379689
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/07/2017
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of The New York Times Book Review’s Best Books of the Year. His balloon book, Falling Upwards, was a New Republic Best Book of the Yearand one of Time Magazine’s Top 10 Non-fiction Books of the Year. His other biographies include Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the 1974 Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (an NBCC finalist), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Prize). This Long Pursuit completes the autobiographical trilogy begun in Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization.

Read an Excerpt

1 Travelling
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "This Long Pursuit"
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Table of Contents

CONFESSIONS
1 Travelling 3
2 Experimenting 19
3 Teaching 45
4 Forgetting 71
5 Ballooning 95

RESTORATIONS
6 Margaret Cavendish 111
7 Zélide 133
8 Madame de Staël 153
9 Mary Wollstonecraft 169
10 Mary Somerville 197

AFTERLIVES
11 John Keats the Well-Beloved 219
12 Shelley Undrowned 243
13 Thomas Lawrence Revarnished 261
14 Coleridge Misremembered 279
15 William Blake Rediscovered 305

Acknowledgements 341
List of Illustrations 345
Index 349

Editorial Reviews

For reasons at which I can only guess, a cohort of great English biographers was born in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Claire Tomalin, Michael Holroyd, Hilary Spurling, Selina Hastings, Jenny Uglow, Hermione Lee, Peter Ackroyd, and the recipient of today's attention, Richard Holmes. Speaking generally, Holmes and the others share a particular sort of empathy with their subjects that — perhaps? — reflects their having come of age as writers in a postwar era of loosening British reticence and, more important, of growing impatience with the notion of empirical objectivity. For Holmes, whose writing career began in the last third of the twentieth century, biography implies a certain intimacy; it is a "handshake across time" and "a simple act of complex friendship."

Best known for his fine biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Holmes is also the author of any number of other works, including The Age of Wonder on the Romantics' discovery of the sublimity of science, and now, with the publication This Long Pursuit, three collections of shorter pieces. In "Travelling," the first chapter in the present book, Holmes writes that empathy is the biographer's "most valuable but perilous weapon." Empathy of some sort is a fairly obvious requirement for the biographer of any era, but like all abstract qualities its nature and meaning mutate over the generations. For Holmes, empathy involves more than sympathy or intellectual grasp, but something akin to union. He decided early on that biography demanded that he "physically pursue his subject through the past," putting himself in every place the subjects lived, visited, passed through, and even dreamed of, to recapture what they experienced.

As he travels and pursues his research through texts, correspondence, journals, and what have you, he engages in "a form of double accounting," keeping a record of the objective facts of his subject's life on the right side of a notebook and his own questions, speculations, impressions, emotions — all his reactions and puzzlements — on the left side. In this way he edges into the life, getting as close to his subject's experience and inner world as possible. In Holmes's view, biography is a "an act of imaginative faith," and I would say that it is not given to everyone to pull it off — the faculty is a rare one.

The book includes a chapter on the questions he raised in his own mind in writing The Age of Wonder, which is to say, questions on the relationship of science and creative literature — a subject that I, in a distinct minority, find interesting only in its loonier manifestations. There is an excellent chapter on the teaching of biography writing and the changing nature of biography over time, the latter being one of his persistent themes. There's another fine essay on memory, which is to say, forgetting; and a chapter on ballooning — the author's eccentric obsession, about which he wrote his last book, Falling Upwards.

After all this, Holmes gets down to business — his business: biographical writing. In separate chapters he looks at the lives of ten writers who flourished — artistically, if not materially — in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some are his old pals, notably Shelley, Coleridge, and Wollstonecraft, and in taking them up again he demonstrates how never-ending the writing of one life truly is. In a wonderful essay, "Shelley Unbound," Holmes discusses the warping effect the actual events in a subject's life have on our later assessment of that subject. This is a very odd, very astute observation, and one he explores brilliantly in showing how Shelley's untimely death "was used to define an entire life, to frame a complete biography," producing "what might be called thanatography." Prime mover in this respect was Shelley's friend, "the incorrigible myth-making" Edward John Trelawny, who, over fifty years, continued to rewrite his account of the fatal shipwreck "accumulating more and more baroque details, like some sinister biographical coral reef."

The emphasis put on the Romantic tragedy of the poet's death — which Holmes shows to have been the result of imprudence, bad luck, and incompetently altered boat design, rather than destiny — affected not only assessments of Shelley's character but also how his poems were interpreted, lending them a fatalistic and prophetic import. As a tonic, Holmes throws the Romantic version of Shelley as "a youthful, sacrificial genius" up against an alternate history in which the poet does not die at twenty-nine in 1822. Given the trajectory of his unfinished work and his political beliefs, Shelley, Holmes suggests, would likely have put his pen behind the Reform Bill of 1832, "sharpened up" John Stuart Mill, "hobnobbed with Coleridge at Highgate ('a little more laudanum, Bysshe?')," and eventually be "scandalously elected as the first Professor of Poetry and Politics at the newly founded, and strictly secular, University of London."

In addition to Shelley, Coleridge, and Wollstonecraft, Holmes devotes a chapter to Margaret Cavendish ("Mad Madge"), developing the theme that women, excluded from membership in the Royal Society for 285 years, were more alert than men to the social implications of science. Other chapters cover Isobelle de Tuyll, known as Zélide, and her first biographer, Geoffrey Scott; Madame de Staël and her influence of the Romantics and later writers; Mary Somerville, first to write about science for the common reader; the interpretations and uses of John Keats (though Holmes is strangely silent on the adventures of Keats and Chapman in Myles na Gopaleen's ludicrous columns in the Irish Times of yore); the portrait painter Thomas Lawrence; and William Blake and the reclamation of his reputation.

Holmes has called himself "an experimental biographer . . . fascinated equally by lives as they are lived, and lives as they are told." The pieces here are an expression of that, of "the infinitely puzzling difference between chance and destiny in biographical narrative; between the contingent and the inevitable, between the phrase 'and then . . . ' and the phrase 'and because . . . ' " as each sends the story off in a different direction. Life may be short, but biography never ends.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers

The Barnes & Noble Review

With Footsteps [Holmes] began what has turned into a cycle of works by a "Romantic biographer," shapely nonfiction stories about lives and the art of writing them. He billed Sidetracks, his second, as a "personal casebook" or a sort of "sentimental education." With This Long Pursuit he completes the trilogy. Holmes sees his new volume as a "declaration of faith," though it is as much a book of parables. It includes as well his 10 tongue-in-cheek commandments. In his ninth Holmes prescribes an immodest pride in biography, an English gift to the world on a par with cricket and the full-cooked breakfast. With his 10th he advocates humility, as "we can never know, or write, the Last Word about the Human Heart." The master admits, after all these years, that he remains mystified by his elusive art.

The New York Times Book Review - Stacy Schiff

01/09/2017
Holmes’s (The Age of Wonder) concluding entry in the trilogy begun with Footsteps and Sidetracks is part memoir, part biography, and part deep reflection about his own creative process as a biographer. The book is divided into three sections: “Confessions” opens with Holmes’s recollections of his travels in the footsteps of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and continues on to his interest in the women scientists and scientific inventions of Coleridge’s time, thoughts about memory and forgetting, and fascination with hot-air balloon rides. “Restorations” offers chapter-length biographies of five pre-20th-century women writers whom, aside from Mary Wollstonecraft, are largely forgotten, accompanied by Holmes’s thoughts about earlier biographies of these subjects. “Afterlives” revisits selected episodes from the lives of John Keats, Percy Shelley, Thomas Lawrence, Coleridge, and William Blake, and considers how they, too, have been portrayed by biographers. Throughout, Holmes explores the art of biography and how biographers construct their sometimes conflicting stories about their subjects’ lives. “Biography,” Holmes writes, “is not merely a mode of historical enquiry. It is an act of imaginative faith.” His effort is largely successful, though the book is slow-paced as he meanders from subject to subject. This elegantly written, curl-up-by-the-fire read will satisfy Holmes’s prior fans and introduce new readers to his works and ideas. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Riveting…. The author’s focus remains sharp throughout, as he sketches his individuals’ lives, discusses the published biographies of them (from the earliest to the latest), and reveals his theories and beliefs about the writing of biography, beliefs that he has used to develop graduate courses in biography….Throughout, he manifests the patience and the persistence to do right by his subjects. Unparalleled research, transparent prose, and wide eyes can serve as a model for other biographers—indeed, for all other writers.”
—Kirkus Reviews *starred review*

“An accessible account of the biographer’s craft as well as a delightful portrait gallery of fascinating figures.”
—Library Journal

“Among modern biographers, I can think of few rivals to Richard Holmes, especially among those who write about the Romantic era….Few biographers have dwelled as explicitly on their writing experiences as Holmes, and I’m grateful to him….This Long Pursuit may be seen as a continuation of this writer’s ‘search for truth,’ and it shimmers with odd revelations that…often seem indispensable.”
—Jay Parini, The American Scholar

“A must read . . . Intriguing and satisfying . . . All the sketches make illuminating reading, in many cases deliberately setting out to provoke a rethink of earlier biographies . . . I thoroughly enjoyed the book; indeed I devoured it.”
—The Guardian

“A glorious series of essays on the art of life writing and a worthy successor to Holmes’s earlier volumes on the craft, Footsteps and Sidetracks . . . Heaven for his fans [and] the best account imaginable for the richness of his form.”
—The Observer

“In This Long Pursuit, the 71-year-old Mr. Holmes is revisiting old heroes, bringing them and their milieu vividly to life. In the process he does a lot to illuminate the very nature of biography itself….This Long Pursuit also explores the lives of some of the inevitably less familiar women writers and scientists who shaped this era in surprising ways….Mr. Holmes writes with insight about how women navigated the societies in which they lived and wrote.”
—The Economist

“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 from our own time.”
—Oliver Sacks

From the Publisher

02/15/2017
"My God, how does one write biography?" Virginia Woolf asked. For over four decades, Holmes (Shelley; Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage) has been answering this question elegantly and informatively. This book forms a trilogy with Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000) as attempts at intellectual autobiography. All the chapters here began as lectures, articles, or introductions, and they cover a wide range of topics. The text opens with an explanation of how Holmes came to write The Age of Wonder (2008) about science in England between 1768 and 1831. This discussion is followed by his description of a course in life writing he taught. Many of the chapters provide thumbnail biographies, including those of Margaret Cavendish, Isabelle de Tuyll (who captivated both James Boswell and Benjamin Constant), and popular science writer Mary Somerville. Holmes is particularly eager to emphasize women's contributions to various fields. He also explores the role of biography in shaping—and sometimes misshaping—perceptions about an individual. VERDICT An accessible account of the biographer's craft as well as a delightful portrait gallery of fascinating figures. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]—Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

Library Journal

★ 2016-12-18
The third in the author's series of riveting titles about the histories, activities, duties, and effects of biographers.Holmes (Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air, 2013, etc.), who has written major biographies of Shelley, Coleridge, and others, has published previously on his current themes (Footsteps and Sidetracks), and his new volume brings together thoroughly rewritten pieces that had earlier incarnations as speeches, essays, and various ruminations. Early on he reiterates his fundamental belief that biographers must pursue their quarry: follow their footsteps and explore their sidetracks. Holmes proceeds to do so again here in sections that revisit the lives of the celebrated (Wollstonecraft, Shelley—both Mary and Percy Bysshe—Coleridge, Keats, Blake), but he also reacquaints us with some lesser-known notables like Margaret Cavendish, Isabelle de Tuyll, and Mary Somerville. The author's focus remains sharp throughout, as he sketches his individuals' lives, discusses the published biographies of them (from the earliest to the latest), and reveals his theories and beliefs about the writing of biography, beliefs that he has used to develop graduate courses in biography. Holmes proves to be a generous critic of the work of his predecessors and contemporaries—the word "superb" appears more than once—and he evinces awe when he considers what some early biographers experienced and endured to complete their work. In a few chapters, the author revises what we have previously thought about Coleridge's early lectures and about the importance of Shelley's drowning. Most impressive, though, are Holmes' erudition—is there a relevant text he has not read or a significant site he has not visited?—and his clear, sharply focused prose. Throughout, he manifests the patience and the persistence to do right by his subjects. Unparalleled research, transparent prose, and wide eyes can serve as a model for other biographers—indeed, for all other writers.

Kirkus Reviews