Footsteps adventures of a Romantic Biographer

Richard Holmes

Published by Elisabeth Sifton Books , hardcover with duskjacket , illustrated

This is the story of an English biographer traveling alone through Europe in search of the Romantic writers of the past. It begins when the author is eighteen, sleeping rough in the hills of the Cévennes, and ends when he is thirty, deciding reluctantly to come home from his attic room in Paris.

Full of the color and exhilarating sense of freedom he finds on the road in Europe, Richard Holmes's account of his journeys and self-discoveries also takes us deep into the imaginative world of biographical research. It shows how the past can come vividly alive, rising with ghostlike power out of contemporary places and events.

Starting with his innocent fascination with Robert Louis Stevenson's famous Travels with a Donkey, Holmes moves into the more complicated and dangerous world of the British writers marooned in Paris during the French Revolutionary Terror, among them the young William Wordsworth and the passionate feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. He continues into Italy — the "paradise of exiles" — with the poet Shelley; and finally he returns to Paris, in an attempt to disentangle the strange life and death of the visionary writer Gérard de Nerval.

Holmes's book shows us the biographer at work, grappling with problems of evidence, building up character and motivation, and struggling with the pitfalls of selfidentification and the intense loneliness of literary work. Each of his investigations combines elements of travelogue, detective story, and love story in a highly original way. Each explores the world of Romanticism, but also draws on modern parallels with the biographer's own experience of the late 1960s and the conservative reaction of the 1970s.

Footsteps sets out as a simple travel book, but ends up as something more: a study in the art of biography and an unusual account of one writer's initiation into the magic landscape of the Imagination.