Scott on Zélide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott

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Richard Holmes. Scott on Zélide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott

Scott on Zélide. Edited with an Introduction by Richard Holmes. The Portrait of Zélide

Geoffrey Scott

CLASSIC BIOGRAPHIES EDITED BY RICHARD HOLMES

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION. 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

SELECT CHRONOLOGY

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

NOTE

FURTHER READING

INDEX

Copyright

About the Publisher

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Defoe on Sheppard and Wild

Johnson on Savage

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This, at any rate, is the challenging note on which the biography opens. It is a proposition taken from Benjamin Constant, the young intellectual enchanter, and the male figure in the story with whom Scott most closely identified. Constant later wrote of Zélide in Adolphe: ‘Like so many others this woman had begun her career by sailing forth to conquer society, rejoicing in the possession of moral toughness and a powerful mind. But she did not understand the ways of the world and, again like so many others, through failing to adapt herself to an artificial but necessary code of behaviour, she had lived to see her progress disappointed and her youth pass joylessly away until, finally, old age overtook her without subduing her.’ (Adolphe, Chapter 1) This was exactly what Scott, as Zélide’s first modern English biographer and champion, apparently concluded of his heroine too.

But did hê Geoffrey Scott’s personal identification with his material was far greater than at first appears. It is partly this that makes the biography so subtly engaging and self-contradictory. Far from producing a coolly objective study of Zélide, the deliberately polished ‘studio portrait’ that he claimed, Scott was writing something perilously close to autobiography. This too makes the biography peculiarly modern in its shifting layers of symbolism and self-reflection.

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