Shelley

Shelley: The Pursuit

Richard Holmes (author)

A fantastic reissue of Richard Holmes’ epic biography of this most enigmatic and intriguing of the Romantic poets. This is simply one of the greatest biographical achievements of recent years.

Shelley, the most neglected of all the great Romantic poets, was born in Sussex in 1792 and died in Tuscany in 1822, a brief life packed with love affairs, alarums and excursions. Holmes’s book offers a serious and critical reappraisal of Shelley as a man and a writer; all his prose and poetry is carefully re-examined, his sense of spiritual and geographical isolation brilliantly described and a detailed portrait of his macabre imaginative life slowly assembled.

Shelley’s intense friendships with some of the most remarkable figures of his age fill Holmes’s pages with a vivid parorama of revolutionary idealism and recklessness. To this is added the private story of Shelley’s tortuous romantic liaisons, complications which affected both the peculiar tenor of his daily life and the remotest conceptions of his poetry.

This is a stunning, entrancing biography of a fascinating subject, and a timely reissue of an absolutely seminal work.

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.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial (3 Oct. 2005)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 848 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 9780007204588
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 5.2 x 19.8 cm