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This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes
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Review
“[Holmes] is temperamentally well suited to the Romantic age. He does not so much write lives as haunt them; he seems to invade his subject’s dreams. Moonlight glints off his pages. Certainly no one has made the practice of biography sound so appealing….He does for biography what Cheryl Strayed did for the Pacific Crest Trail.” —Stacy Schiff, The New York Times Book Review“Elegant….Nobody has thought longer or harder about the nature of biography as a literary form than Richard Holmes….This Long Pursuit can stand either as an introduction to his full-length works or as a reminder of what makes them so compelling.” —Michael Gorra, Wall Street Journal“Subtly personal….The “Footsteps principle” allows the narrative to build on clearly visualized scenes, even as the overall tone is that of intimate, civilized conversation. Above all, Holmes never comes across as stiff or stuffy, but rather, at 71, almost boyishly eager to share his delight in the surprising vagaries of a human life or the odd factoids of history….This Long Pursuit offers an abundance of literary entertainment and instruction.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post“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“In the tradition of most successful historians and biographers, Holmes seems to achieve this intimacy with the past by immersing himself, trance-like, within a given terrain, with every brick or rock or tree a talisman tugging him deeper and deeper into the immense well of human experience…. Holmes’s style pleasingly resembles that of his fellow Englishman, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. Like that celebrated man of letters, Holmes comes across as contagiously curious, casually erudite, and just a bit daft…. In spending so much of his life chronicling the lives of poets, he has, to the delight of his readers, become one.” —The Christian Science Monitor“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…. 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.”—Barnes and Noble Review“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
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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, was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and was one of The New York Times Book Review’s Best Books of the Year in 2009. His other books include Falling Upwards, Footsteps, Sidetracks, Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the 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 James Tait Blake Prize). Holmes is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in Great Britain.
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Product details
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Pantheon (March 7, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 030737968X
ISBN-13: 978-0307379689
Product Dimensions:
6.4 x 1.3 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
5.0 out of 5 stars
8 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#379,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
What an extraordinary observer, writer, and biographer is Richard Holmes, author of "This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer." In 1964, as an 18-year-old, he took himself off to south-central France to learn more about Robert Louis Stevenson, who, seeking better health, had relocated to France for several years in the 1870s. Even without formal academic training, Holmes quickly hit upon two valuable methods for studying the lives of others. The first was to walk in the footsteps and moccasins of his subjects, and the second to keep meticulous notebooks with pages divided into columns to sort out facts from personal assessments. In 2000, decades after launching this freelance approach to biography, the by-now-celebrated Holmes was asked to teach a postgraduate course on the discipline of biography. After several years teaching, this volume was, it might be said, destined to be a meditative reflection on a notable career."This Long Pursuit" is divided into three sections of fairly equal length. The first puts Holmes's career into perspective, offers lessons on the art of biography including his celebration of how science and literature often cross-pollinated each other, and presents ten commandments for writing lives. I must confess to treasuring in particular this section, as most of my career at the CIA involved the biographic assessment of foreign leaders. Section two, titled "Restorations," has Holmes examining five women: Margaret Cavendish, Zelide, Madame de Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Sommerville. Section three, "Afterlives," focuses on five men (Keats, Shelley, Thomas Lawrence, Coleridge, and Blake), dwelling on the issue of how assessments of the famous can change over time.
Richard Holmes writes wonderful biographical material. This book of musings on the craft of writing biography inspired me to read his Age of Wonder, which I also loved. I tried his biography of Shelley, but found it too detailed and frankly boring.
A wonderful book. Mr. Holmes undertakes a hero's quest to the Romantic Era and brings back much to enlighten and delight his readers.
excellent book. Aeeived in perfect shape
I'm only half way through so far, but this book is awesome. Incredible depth of knowledge on the topic and a fun quick pace of writing.
Classic essays
This is the second of his books I've read. Since he and I are almost the same age, I believe I read his first or second when it came out. I liked it as I vaguely recall, but I've matured; I love this book. It's the best kind of book because it leads you on to many, many others. I have ordered at least 4 or 5 books relating to people he discusses or literary or scientific matters he treats, and I think even one travel book. I'm also charmed by Sir Richard putting himself in the book, discussing what biography and some of his subject mean to him. It's a much more personal approach. I recommended it to a friend for his reading group because the issues, people, ideas and events discussed are endlessly fascinating and eternally debatable.
The observation by Erasmus probably indicates Richard Holmes's own priorities when in school and at university. His love of great literature and those who create it is almost palpable.While explaining “how the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science,†in The Age of Wonder, Holmes focuses on what “became the first great age of the public scientific lecture, the laboratory demonstration and the introductory textbook, often written by women. It was the age when science began to be taught to children, and the `experimental method' became the basis of a new, secular philosophy of life, in which the infinite wonders of Creation (whether divine or not) were increasingly valued for their own sake…Finally, it was the age which challenged the elite monopoly of the Royal Society, and saw the foundation of scores of new scientific institutions, mechanics institutes and 'philosophical' societies.'"What we have in This Long Pursuit is also a work of rigorous and eloquent reflections shared by the same Romantic biographer, with his focus on “the meeting of two great modes of human discovery — imaginative literature and science — [that] has become one of the most urgent subjects for modern biography to study and understand. I believe this is particularly so in both Britain and America. You could say that if our world is to be saved, we must understand it both scientifically and imaginatively.†Biography “is ‘a handshake.’ A handshake across time, but also across cultures, across beliefs, across disciplines, across genders, and across ways of life. It is a simple act of complex friendship.†I certainly view Holmes as a friend, one whose brilliant work is a welcome “handshake†of mutual respect.It has always seemed to Holmes that “the essential spirit of biography – of English biography at least – has been a maverick and unacademic one.†It comes as no surprise, therefore, that many (if not most) of of his subjects in recent books have been outliers. Much of the most interesting and innovative as well as exciting work biography “has been done outside the establish institutes of learning, and beyond the groves of academe.â€These are among the major figures on whom he focuses, listed in alpha order: William Blake, Fanny Brawne, Lord Byron, Mary Cavendish, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Germaine de Staël, Elizabeth Farren, William Godwin, John Keats, Thomas Lawrence, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Pepys, Percy Shelley, Mary Somerville, Isabelle van Tuyll (Zelide), and Mary Wollstonecraft.There are several reasons why Holmes is one of my favorite historians. Here’s one. Great historians write books that are, for me, “magic carpets†that enable me to travel far beyond my world to ancient Greece or Bunker Hill or Victorian London or...almost anywhere and at any time, really. I feel like I am tagging along with him as we explore together the given portion of the past. Later, once I have finished reading one of his books, I am again reminded of this passage in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."Thank you, Richard Holmes, for expanding my world and enriching my understanding of it.
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