Footsteps - Adventures of a Romantic Biographer - Hardcover

Holmes, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670323535 ISBN 13: 9780670323531

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1985

Synopsis

Richard Holmes's great work of biographical exploration, rejacketed and republished alongside its sister volume 'Sidetracks'. In 1985, Richard Holmes published a small book of essays called 'Footsteps' and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mix of travel, biographical sleuthing and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains ons of the most intoxicating, magical works of modern literary exploration ever published. Sleeping rough, he retraces Robert Louis Stevenson's famous journey through the Cevennes. Caught up in the Parisian riots of the 1960s, he dives back in time to the terrors of Wordsworth and of Mary Wollstonecraft marooned in Revolutionary Paris and then into the strange tortured worlds of Gerard de Nerval. Wandering through Italy, he stalks Shelley and his band of Romantic idealists to Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Richard Holmes knew he had become a true biographer the day his bank bounced a check that he had inadvertently dated 1772. Because for the acclaimed chronicler of Shelly and Coleridge, biography is a physical pursuit, an ardent and arduous retracing of footsteps that may have vanished centuries before. In this gripping book, Holmes takes us from France's Massif Central, where he followed the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and a sweet-natured donkey, to Mary Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary Paris, to the Italian villages where Percy Shelly tried to cast off the structures of English morality and marriage. Footsteps is a wonderful exploration of the ties between biographers and their subjects, filled with passion and revelation.

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0670323535
• ISBN 13: 9780670323531
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288