Footsteps: Adventures of a romantic biographer - Hardcover

Holmes, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340283378 ISBN 13: 9780340283370

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, 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 Age of Wonder, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Books Critics Circle Award, and was one of the New York Times Book Review's Best Books of the Year in 2009. Holmes's other books include This Long Pursuit, Footsteps, Sidetracks, Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the James Tait Black Prize). He was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0340283378
• ISBN 13: 9780340283370
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 287