Across three centuries, and much of Europe - 'Holmes writes beautifully... A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation' The Oldie In 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 Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft and Zelide. 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.

Author Biography

Richard Holmes is the author of the prize-winning and bestselling 'The Age of Wonder', which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (UK) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (USA). He has written many other books including 'Falling Upwards', an uplifting account of the pioneering generation of balloon aeronauts, which was one of Time Magazine's Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of 2013. His trilogy exploring the Romantic Biographer at work, begun with the classic 'Footsteps', and its companion volume 'Sidetracks', is now completed by 'This Long Pursuit'. His first biography, 'Shelley: The Pursuit', won the Somerset Maugham Prize; 'Coleridge: Early Visions' won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award; 'Coleridge: Darker Reflections' won the Duff Cooper and the Heinemann Awards; 'Dr Johnson & Mr Savage' won the James Tait Black Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of East Anglia, East London and Kingston, and was Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia from 2001 to 2007. He is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in London and Norfolk with the novelist Rose Tremain.