Across three centuries, and much of Europe – “Holmes writes beautifully… A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation’ The OldieIn this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime’s obsession with his Romantic subjects. This pursuit 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 evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and others almost lost: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft and Zélide. He investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favourite Romantics: 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 enquiring spirit; and at times his mischievous streak. This Long Pursuit contains Richard Holmes’s most personal and seductive writing yet.
