This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

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Richard Holmes. This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Travelling

Experimenting

Teaching

Forgetting

Ballooning

Margaret Cavendish

Zélide

Madame de Staël

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Somerville

John Keats the Well-Beloved

Shelley Undrowned

Thomas Lawrence Revarnished

Coleridge Misremembered

William Blake Rediscovered

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Picture Section

Index

About the Author

Also by Richard Holmes

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

my wonderful editor for more than twenty years

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This led me to look at Davy’s biography, and more generally at the relations between science and literature. For the first time I began to consider how a scientific biography might differ from a literary one. In particular, in my own field of Romantic literature, the connection between Coleridge and Davy made me wonder why the poets and writers of the Romantic period were always presented as hostile to science. Had we unknowingly imported twentieth-century ideas about the notorious split between the ‘Two Cultures’ into Romantic biography? Was there in fact such a thing as Romantic science, and a vital new form of biography to go with it? This is what I began to explore in my next book, The Age of Wonder.

The left-hand side of my notebook became crowded with questions and speculations, many naïve. Did the Romantic men of science (‘men in white coats’) have inner emotional lives comparable in intensity to those of the poets; and if so, what kind of writings would bear witness to this? It seemed possible that scientific biography should be less about individual ‘genius’, and more about teamwork and the social impact of discovery. This might demand something closer to group biography, and a sense of the extended ‘ripple effect’ of science throughout a community. It also raised the pressing question – in the figures of the astronomer Caroline Herschel, the novelist Mary Shelley and the mathematician Mary Somerville – of why women had been excluded from science, in contrast to the way they were establishing themselves in literature.

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