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The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography
Rosemary Ashton explores the many facets of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's complex personality, by turns poet, critic, thinker, enchanting companion, feckless husband, fabled conversationalist and guilt-ridden opium addict.
- GenresBiography
510 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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About the author
Rosemary Ashton
33 books19 followersRosemary Ashton is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and an Honorary Fellow of UCL.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 29, 2009
On Richard Holme's short list of additional reading.
I wonder why she undertook this biography at all - apart from a commission from Blackwell's to prepare a volume for their series of writers' lives. Personally I wish she hadn't.
Her distaste for Coleridge is manifest throughout. Indeed, at the beginning of the second part, she writes that she finds him "repellant," a response obvious from the beginning.
Her duty as a biographer is to portray her subject's world and her subject's experience in that world. She fails entirely in this responsibility. Ashton is so harshly judgemental that she can do little more that transcribe her note cards into segments of text. She certainly doesn't enter into Coleridge's mind and world - which she rejects altogether. I did not read this book in order to be informed of the views, values, preferences and feelings of a middle-aged, bourgeois, academic female, but rather to understand however dimly how Coleridge experienced himself and his world.
But then again, she may well have been frustrated by the appearance of Richard Holmes' biography, which eclipsed and superceded her book even before it was published.
I wonder why she undertook this biography at all - apart from a commission from Blackwell's to prepare a volume for their series of writers' lives. Personally I wish she hadn't.
Her distaste for Coleridge is manifest throughout. Indeed, at the beginning of the second part, she writes that she finds him "repellant," a response obvious from the beginning.
Her duty as a biographer is to portray her subject's world and her subject's experience in that world. She fails entirely in this responsibility. Ashton is so harshly judgemental that she can do little more that transcribe her note cards into segments of text. She certainly doesn't enter into Coleridge's mind and world - which she rejects altogether. I did not read this book in order to be informed of the views, values, preferences and feelings of a middle-aged, bourgeois, academic female, but rather to understand however dimly how Coleridge experienced himself and his world.
But then again, she may well have been frustrated by the appearance of Richard Holmes' biography, which eclipsed and superceded her book even before it was published.
Displaying 1 of 1 review