First published 2017
Richard Holmes opens his account by confessing his lifelong obsession with Romantic figures. He has spent three decades pursuing his subjects across Europe, from Keats's final days in Rome to Coleridge's opium-soaked years in the Lake District. Holmes reveals how biography becomes a kind of pilgrimage, blending rigorous research with imaginative leaps. He resurrects forgotten women like the Dutch intellectual Zélide and scientist Mary Somerville alongside familiar names like Mary Wollstonecraft. The author strips away myths that have clouded our view of the Romantics, examining the real Percy Bysshe Shelley behind the drowning legend and the actual William Blake beyond the mad visionary stereotype. Holmes shows us a biographer at work, traveling to archives, teaching students, and sometimes even ballooning in pursuit of his subjects. This becomes both a meditation on the biographical craft and a personal chronicle of intellectual passion, revealing how the boundary between biographer and subject dissolves over time.
Genres: biography, literary-criticism, literary-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir, 21st-century, 19th-century, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: pilgrimage, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Europe, Lake District, Rome
Period: Romantic
368 pages · Hardcover · Pantheon