03115nam 22004093 450 991016494980332120230809222727.01-101-87176-8(CKB)3710000001064345(MiAaPQ)EBC6041827(Au-PeEL)EBL6041827(OCoLC)1156113336(BIP)55832648(BIP)55822630(EXLCZ)99371000000106434520210901d2017 uy 0engurcnu||||||||txtrdacontentcrdamediacrrdacarrierThis Long Pursuit Reflections of a Romantic BiographerWestminster :Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,2017.©2017.1 online resource (279 pages)0-307-37968-X Part I. Confessions -- Travelling -- Experimenting -- Teaching -- Forgetting -- Ballooning -- Part II. Restorations -- Margaret Cavendish -- Zélide -- Madame de Staël -- Mary Wollstonecraft -- Mary Somerville -- Part III. Afterlives -- John Keats the well-beloved -- Shelley undrowned -- Thomas Lawrence revarnished -- Coleridge misremembered -- William Blake rediscovered.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.809.93592Holmes Richard13750MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910164949803321This Long Pursuit2893119UNINA