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Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer
In 1985 Richard Holmes published a book called Footsteps , and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mixture of travel, biographical sleuthing, and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains one of the most intoxicating and magical works of modern literary investigation ever written.
Now Holmes has put together a further and wonderfully revealing exploration of his biographical methods. Sidetracks is his personal casebook, assembled from decades of "wanderings from the straight and narrow" of his major biographies. It is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated him. "This is the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest," says Holmes, "a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject and the form to fit it."
Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities--French, English, Dutch, and American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and de Nerval, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, James Boswell and Robert Louis Stevenson, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda.
With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful, and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical "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."
Now Holmes has put together a further and wonderfully revealing exploration of his biographical methods. Sidetracks is his personal casebook, assembled from decades of "wanderings from the straight and narrow" of his major biographies. It is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated him. "This is the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest," says Holmes, "a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject and the form to fit it."
Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities--French, English, Dutch, and American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and de Nerval, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, James Boswell and Robert Louis Stevenson, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda.
With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful, and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical "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."
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
23 people are currently reading
180 people want to read
About the author
Richard Holmes
31 books241 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
See this thread for more information.
Biographer Richard Holmes was born in London, England on 5 November 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. His first book, Shelley:The Pursuit, was published in 1974 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. The first volume of his biography of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions, was published in 1989 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year award. Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993), an account of Johnson's undocumented friendship with the notorious poet Richard Savage, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) in 1993. The second volume of his study of Coleridge, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, was published in 1998. It won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Heinemann Award and was shortlisted for the first Samuel Johnson Prize awarded in 1999.
Richard Holmes writes and reviews regularly for various journals and newspapers, including the New York Review of Books. His most recent book, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000), continues the exploration of his own highly original biographical method that he first wrote about in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985). He is also editor of a new series of editions of classic English biographies that includes work by Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe and William Godwin.
His latest book, The Age of Wonder (2008), is an examination of the life and work of the scientists of the Romantic age who laid the foundations of modern science. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an OBE in 1992. He was awarded an honorary Litt.D. in 2000 by the University of East Anglia, where he was appointed Professor of Biographical Studies in September 2001.
See this thread for more information.
Biographer Richard Holmes was born in London, England on 5 November 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. His first book, Shelley:The Pursuit, was published in 1974 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. The first volume of his biography of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions, was published in 1989 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year award. Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993), an account of Johnson's undocumented friendship with the notorious poet Richard Savage, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) in 1993. The second volume of his study of Coleridge, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, was published in 1998. It won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Heinemann Award and was shortlisted for the first Samuel Johnson Prize awarded in 1999.
Richard Holmes writes and reviews regularly for various journals and newspapers, including the New York Review of Books. His most recent book, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000), continues the exploration of his own highly original biographical method that he first wrote about in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985). He is also editor of a new series of editions of classic English biographies that includes work by Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe and William Godwin.
His latest book, The Age of Wonder (2008), is an examination of the life and work of the scientists of the Romantic age who laid the foundations of modern science. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an OBE in 1992. He was awarded an honorary Litt.D. in 2000 by the University of East Anglia, where he was appointed Professor of Biographical Studies in September 2001.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 19, 2008
I enjoyed his pieces on Godwin and Wollstonecraft, Voltaire and Boswell, and his radio-play about Shelley... I found all of them illuminating and intelligent. His comments about his sojourns in Paris sounded a little smug to me, though...
And there were LOTS of typos (very careless editor here).
For an absolutely wonderful book by Holmes, read his biography of Shelley.
And there were LOTS of typos (very careless editor here).
For an absolutely wonderful book by Holmes, read his biography of Shelley.
March 11, 2018
Really, 4.5 stars. Like his previous autobiographical collection of sketches of the biographer's art, Holmes illuminates the "sidetracks" of writing about the lives of authors. This collection are a series of articles that Holmes wrote about intriguing footnotes to those larger works, a compendium of "B sides" as it were to his major works. Some of them are more interesting than others to me, but my favorites are masterpieces, particularly works on Shelley's last days before he drowned, the love story of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft - the philosopher and the feminist - as an allegory for the subsuming of the Age of Reason by the Age of Romanticism, an insightful look at how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda came to realize in 1930 that the days they romanticized in their novels were in the past and that they were "washed up", a brief biography of Voltaire and his loves, and a deeper look at Boswell, the godfather of the literary biography. Essential for deep readers of the Romantic era of literature.
March 25, 2019
Like any collection of essays and miscellanies, this is a mixed bag. The essays on Chatterton, Wolstencroft, Scrope and Voltaire are very interesting. The radio pieces don't translate well to the written page, though the piece on Shelley read better than that on Nerval. The reminiscences of time spent in Paris seemed oddly out of place. The collection could have been 50 pages shorter without suffering.
April 22, 2011
Richard Holmes puts together a very enjoyable sampler that is both an introduction to his own thinking about biography, and to a cast list of vaguely and strongly interlinked characters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald bringing us into the 20th).
The collection begins with Holmes' very first biographical piece, a study of the vastly precocious poet Thomas Chatterton who committed suicide (or overdosed accidentally) at the age of 17, shortly after moving to London to cement his already florishing (but cloudy) literary career. Holmes himself was in his early 20s, and had recently moved to London after finishing up at Cambridge:
In a sense, Holmes continues, by being commissioned to write a book on 'Prodigies', and being led down the fascinating sidetrack of Chatterton's short life, biography 'saved my life by giving it a new dimension'.
His piece on Chatterton featured, in large and small roles, many of the writers who Holmes would eventually work with: Coleridge and Shelley the most significant of them. But 'Sidetracks' collects together nearly twenty pieces - ranging from radio plays to newspaper articles to an extended book introduction - that range around figures who Holmes has at one time or another spent significant time with even though a book may not have eventuated.
'Sidetracks' introduced me to the lives of many figures who I know barely anything about - Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill - and a range of colourful, if not well known, characters: Oscar Wilde's gothic-novel-writing grand-uncle, the famed Parisian Pierrot Jean-Gaspard Deburau, tried for murder after striking down a labourer who mocked him in the street, the early Parisian photographer Nadar.
These are often stories of refashioning of identities, of passionate, almost crazed love and actions, of extremity to the point of absurdity. The pieces are packed with nuggety details: the Parisian journalist Théophile Gautier on an anthropological jaunt to London, is enchanted by a flock of white pigeons released 'like a shout of purest joy' every time a winner came in at Ascot; he later learns they are working birds, released to carry the results to bookies all over England. Mary Wollstonecraft goes to Norway on behalf of the father of her illegitimate daughter (who no longer returns her affections) to track down a ship loaded with Spanish silver plate that has been absconded with by a turncoat sailor. Twenty-two year old James Boswell ('the godfather of biography') in The Hague,his head turned by his 'Dutch tulips' - the lovely ladies who run rings around him whilst he attempts to dazzle them. Lord Lisle up on the roof of the Tower, crying out to Henry VIII for forgiveness (successfully).
Collections of short biographies can often feel facile - you can sense everything that's being elided in order to tell a coherent story in ten pages. Holmes strings his sections together with short introductions that give context around where he was professionally and personally at that time, and how his subjects 'found him'. Highly recommended.
The collection begins with Holmes' very first biographical piece, a study of the vastly precocious poet Thomas Chatterton who committed suicide (or overdosed accidentally) at the age of 17, shortly after moving to London to cement his already florishing (but cloudy) literary career. Holmes himself was in his early 20s, and had recently moved to London after finishing up at Cambridge:
Prospects were fair, work was easy to find in those days, and I had a good circle of friends. Yet the truth was that I felt suicidally lonely and depressed for much of the time. This was not particularly unusual for a young man coming to the big city. But I was mad to write, I felt I was nothing unless I could write. The inky demon drove me night and day and I simply could not see how he (or she) might be appeased. I am not sure that this feeling has ever left me.
In a sense, Holmes continues, by being commissioned to write a book on 'Prodigies', and being led down the fascinating sidetrack of Chatterton's short life, biography 'saved my life by giving it a new dimension'.
I began to live what is, I suppose, the conscious double-life of the biographer, with one foot in the present and the other continually in the past. Suddenly I had found that space in which it became possible to write: my own version of Virginia Woolf's 'room of one's own'.
His piece on Chatterton featured, in large and small roles, many of the writers who Holmes would eventually work with: Coleridge and Shelley the most significant of them. But 'Sidetracks' collects together nearly twenty pieces - ranging from radio plays to newspaper articles to an extended book introduction - that range around figures who Holmes has at one time or another spent significant time with even though a book may not have eventuated.
'Sidetracks' introduced me to the lives of many figures who I know barely anything about - Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill - and a range of colourful, if not well known, characters: Oscar Wilde's gothic-novel-writing grand-uncle, the famed Parisian Pierrot Jean-Gaspard Deburau, tried for murder after striking down a labourer who mocked him in the street, the early Parisian photographer Nadar.
These are often stories of refashioning of identities, of passionate, almost crazed love and actions, of extremity to the point of absurdity. The pieces are packed with nuggety details: the Parisian journalist Théophile Gautier on an anthropological jaunt to London, is enchanted by a flock of white pigeons released 'like a shout of purest joy' every time a winner came in at Ascot; he later learns they are working birds, released to carry the results to bookies all over England. Mary Wollstonecraft goes to Norway on behalf of the father of her illegitimate daughter (who no longer returns her affections) to track down a ship loaded with Spanish silver plate that has been absconded with by a turncoat sailor. Twenty-two year old James Boswell ('the godfather of biography') in The Hague,his head turned by his 'Dutch tulips' - the lovely ladies who run rings around him whilst he attempts to dazzle them. Lord Lisle up on the roof of the Tower, crying out to Henry VIII for forgiveness (successfully).
Collections of short biographies can often feel facile - you can sense everything that's being elided in order to tell a coherent story in ten pages. Holmes strings his sections together with short introductions that give context around where he was professionally and personally at that time, and how his subjects 'found him'. Highly recommended.
April 20, 2017
Collection of essays previously published in newspapers.
After the wonderful "Footsteps", I found this really disappointing.
After the wonderful "Footsteps", I found this really disappointing.
May 21, 2014
Holmes is SUCH a pleasure to read, whoever his subject may be, known to me beforehand or not. I'm happy to have most of his "Shelley" ahead of me, and then "Footsteps," "Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage," and the newest one, about hot air ballooning.
January 31, 2017
a compilation of occasional pieces & curiosities. some, like wollstonecraft & godwin, one can do without. holmes's style is always pleasing.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews