Richard Holmes's luminous meditation on the art of biography explores
the fascinating relationship between fact and fiction through his own
personal experience as a biographer. Ranging widely over art, science,
and poetry, Holmes describes a pilgrimage of the heart that has taken
him across three centuries. He powerfully evokes the lives of women both
scientific and literary: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine
de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. Holmes
investigates the reductive myths that have overshadowed some favorite
Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy
Bysshe Shelley, the opium-soaked Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad
visionary William Blake. This great chronicler of the Romantics has
produced a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it
contains his most personal and most seductive writing.