This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

In this chronicle of his lifelong obsession with re-creating the lives of writers and scientists, Richard Holmes here casts a new eye not only on the Romantic poets and lost women of Romantic science he has long studied, but on their biographers, as well. He examines the evolution of the myths that have overshadowed certain lives (Percy Shelley's death at sea, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium-fueled lectures), and reveals how the manner in which each generation tells the stories of the lives...