This Long Pursuit

January 9, 2017
Holmes’s (The Age of Wonder) concluding entry in the trilogy begun with Footsteps and Sidetracks is part memoir, part biography, and part deep reflection about his own creative process as a biographer. The book is divided into three sections: “Confessions” opens with Holmes’s recollections of his travels in the footsteps of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and continues on to his interest in the women scientists and scientific inventions of Coleridge’s time, thoughts about memory and forgetting, and fascination with hot-air balloon rides. “Restorations” offers chapter-length biographies of five pre-20th-century women writers whom, aside from Mary Wollstonecraft, are largely forgotten, accompanied by Holmes’s thoughts about earlier biographies of these subjects. “Afterlives” revisits selected episodes from the lives of John Keats, Percy Shelley, Thomas Lawrence, Coleridge, and William Blake, and considers how they, too, have been portrayed by biographers. Throughout, Holmes explores the art of biography and how biographers construct their sometimes conflicting stories about their subjects’ lives. “Biography,” Holmes writes, “is not merely a mode of historical enquiry. It is an act of imaginative faith.” His effort is largely successful, though the book is slow-paced as he meanders from subject to subject. This elegantly written, curl-up-by-the-fire read will satisfy Holmes’s prior fans and introduce new readers to his works and ideas.