Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

Overview

In this beautiful reissue, the author of 'Footsteps' collects the biographical curiosities he discovered while researching the romantic poets, creating a captivating mixture of biography and memoir.‘Sidetracks' is a sister book to 'Footsteps', conjured up from decades of 'wanderings from the straight and narrow' of his major biographies of Shelley and Coleridge. As Holmes himself says, 'to be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever.'The centerpiece of the book is the poignant, inspiring story of Mary Woolstonecraft, the great feminist crusader and philosopher and her husband, William Godwin. But 'Sidetracks' winds through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities, all made hypnotically alive through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and Gautier, Pierrot and Voltaire, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, James Boswell and Zelide, MR James and some very unpleasant gothic apparitions.'Sidetracks' is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780007380312
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	11/10/2011
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge.

In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as ‘surely the best biography of Shelley ever written’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014.

He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Table of Contents

I. A Romantic Premontion
Introduction Thomas Chatteron

II. Lost in France
Introduction Monsieur Nadar Gautier in London Poor Pierrot Inside the Tower

III. Five Gothic Shadows
Introduction The Singular Affair of the Reverend Mr Barham The Reverend Maturin and Mr Melmoth M. R. James and Others John Stuart Mill Lord Lisle and the Tudor Nixon Tapes

IV. A Philosophical Love Story
Introduction The Feminist and the Philosopher: A Love Story

V. Shelley’s Ghost
Introduction Scrope’s Last Throw To the Tempest Given

VI. Escapes to Paris
Introduction Scott and Zelda: One Last Trip A Summer with the Novelist Letters from Paris Voltaire’s Grin

VII. Homage to the Godfather
Introduction Boswell’s Bicentenary Boswell Among the Tulips Dr. Johnson’s First Cat

Editorial Reviews

Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer gathers 20 pieces-mainly essays, but two BBC radio dramas as well written over the past 30 years. Followers of Mr. Holmes will be pleased to see him revisit, from new perspectives, such pet figures as Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Gerard de Nerval. What sets Mr. Holmes apart is his blend of rigorous scholarship, keen sympathy and infectious zeal for the form itself; he is at once a practitioner, historian and impassioned advocate of biography.
— Wall Street Journal

Ben Downing

These "b-sides and rarities" (stories that arrested Holmes's attention while he was investigating his principal subjects) of an eminent literary biographer, most recognized for his two-volume life of Coleridge, present an atypical mixture of autobiography, literary criticism and travel narrative recalling his 1985 Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and spanning more than 30 years of a prolific career. Claiming "to find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way," Holmes looks back on how the fickle connection between a biographer and his subject comes into existence by examining his own writing. Just as Wallace Stevens incessantly struggled to "catch" his imagination in the very act of imagining, this collection shows that Holmes has always tried to "catch" himself in the very act of writing about someone or something else. Whether writing about the relatively obscure poet Chatterton (a "sidetrack" to Keats) or about figures as well-known as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (retracing the couple's last trip to Europe together), Holmes approaches biography as a kind of literary game, a puzzle whose pieces he puts together to tell readers why things happened as they did. The result is almost novelistic. A BBC radio play takes readers inside the minds of the poet Shelley and his wife, Mary. Though they lack an overall sense of unity, these pieces undeniably confirm why Holmes has been setting new and challenging standards for how biographers approach their subjects, and they make for glorious reading indeed. (Nov. 14) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Noted biographer Holmes (Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834) believes that no biography is ever definitive. That is to say, some of the material discovered by a biographer in the process of his research cannot be included in the book's final draft. Here, Holmes has found the form for his previously unused material in Sidetracks. The material may take the shape of an essay, a short story, a radio plays, a travel vignette, a letter, or fascinating bits and pieces of biographical significance. Holmes's subjects here include, among others, Gerard de Nerval; Thomas Chatterton; F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda; Mary Wollstonecraft; Percy Shelley; Robert Louis Stevenson; Voltaire; James Boswell; Samuel Johnson; and his cat. At one point in his writing on Chatterton, Holmes speaks of "verbal helium," a phrase that could be applied to the author's choices of form as he explores biography in a new way. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 8/00.]--Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., IN Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Holmes, a literary biographer and author of , presents 20 essays on his research into major and minor Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities, revealing the unexpected directions and tantalizing side trips that biographical research can uncover. Holmes received the Somerset Maugham Prize for his book . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews