Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer

by Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes's great work of biographical exploration, rejacketed and republished alongside its sister volume Sidetracks. In 1985, Richard Holmes published a small book of essays called Footsteps and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mix of travel, biographical sleuthing and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains one of the most intoxicating, magical works of modern literary exploration ever published. Sleeping rough, he retraces Robert Louis Stevenson's famous journey through the Cevennes. Caught up in the Parisian riots of the 1960s, he dives back in time to the terrors of Wordsworth and of Mary Wollstonecraft marooned in Revolutionary Paris and then into the strange tortured worlds of Gerard de Nerval. Wandering through Italy, he stalks Shelley and his band of Romantic idealists to Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia.

Genres: Biography, Travel, Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Writing

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subtitled "Adventures of a Romantic Biographer," this book gives the backstory of Holmes' youthful pursuit of the places inhabited by his literary heroes, a practice that led him to become a masterful biographer (primarily of the Romantic poets.) He traces the path of Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey, Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft's experiences in Paris during the French Revolution, Shelley's wanderings around Italy, and Nerval in Paris.

This is an exciting edge of biography, not the facts but the reflections of the facts down the centuries, the mirror images of the past in our own time and in the psychology of the author. When he reflects on the parallels between the student riots in Paris in 1968 and the French Revolution, and in particular the fascination the early Romantics had with this upheaval in world affairs, we see both the Romantics and the sixties through new eyes.

A wonderful book about both travel and literature.

[Graychin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Holmes is on my personal short list of the very best nonfiction writers living today. The man is amazing. He seems to be incapable of making false steps. It was three years ago that I read my first Holmes title, The Age of Wonder, and I still refer to it all the time. It’s a masterpiece. Falling Upwards, if less ambitious, was almost as rewarding, and more fun.

I’m moving now into Holmes’ back catalog with Footsteps, and my admiration only grows. Holmes is primarily known as a biographer of the Romantic generation (Shelley and Coleridge in particular) and this wonderful book is – well, what is it? It’s a book of biography, of history, a memoir, and a coming of age story. You might call it, perhaps, a “memoir of biography.”

In Footsteps Holmes touches on his own youthful inspiration by and (I think it’s fair to say) disillusionment with the revolutionary protest movements of the late 1960s and early ‘70s through the lens of his personal obsessions with Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Gérard de Nerval. Along the way Holmes charts his almost reluctant embrace of the biographer’s calling and explores the values and limits of a life dedicated to the pursuit of (in his word) “ghosts.”

This is just an excellent book. Well written and expertly constructed, it recounts the lives of some rather divergent historical figures, but tells in compelling fashion a single, unified story of personal adventure, youthful idealism, and the dangers of obsession and solipsism. I would suggest that in an oblique way it's also a meditation on the power and shape-shifting nature of human love.

[Brian Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books of all time. That's how important it is to me. Richard Holmes has written some of my very favorites, primarily because he tackles subjects of great personal interest and I am simply enthralled by his writing style and find his books hard to put down.

Part autobiography, part travelogue, part literary biography, Holmes recalls four occasions in which he literally walked in the footsteps of his biographical interests in his journey towards becoming a biographer. It begins in 1964 with Holmes 18 years old and ends in 1976 with Holmes at age 30. In 1964, he compares his experiences as a youth in such a volatile era in Europe with the same volatile times his subjects lived in: Robert Lewis Stevenson traveling though Central France and learning his passion for writing is similar to Holmes learning his passion for biography, 1968 and the riots and revolutions of Europe while first William Wordsworth and then Mary Wollstonecraft witness the French Revolution first hand, 1972 and the spiritual journey of both Holmes and Percy Shelley, and finally 1976 and the awakening (and eventual suicide) of Gerard de Nerval.

This book is transcendent however because the prism extends to myself. I share the personal connection with the writings of most of these writers. I have traveled to Nether Stowey to see Coleridge's cottage. I have visited the graves of Shelley and Keats in Rome, as well as Keats's death room. I sought out (and sweet talked my way into a closed church while battling a fever) the grave of Coleridge in Highgate, London. Like Holmes, it's not just enough to read these authors, but I feel compelled to walk in their footsteps when possible, see their homes, search out their inspirational environments, visit their graves to commune with them, and in some cases, actually do what they did. It's a shared compulsion with Holmes: his leads to writing about their personal idiosyncrasies, mine to read about them. And Holmes is the very best. Compulsive reading for those interested in the art of biography (tons of insight and philosophy about that craft here) as well as those interested in the lives of writers, particularly in the 19th century.

[Vendedor de rápida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reunión de cuatro breves estudios biográficos sobre varios escritores del siglo XIX en los que es tan apasionante la descripción de sus peripecias como los del propio autor, que va deslizando un auténtico tratado de metodología de investigación y reflexión sobre este género. Especialmente emotivo y profundo es el que dedica a Nerval, por el misterio que supuso su vida y su obra.

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

“il buon tempo arriva”

This informative, but rather dull, biography, how-to-write a biography, autobiography of Richard holmes, who wrote about Shelley, Coleridge, and “dr Johnson and mr savage” (winner of the james tait black award) does have some interesting bits, about how holmes went about researching his topics and what angle he was coming from to write a good biography.
So, from above you see shelley’s Italian motto (he inscribed it on a ring, kind of maybe our first hipster? Shelley?) , which I think is “the good times are here”? or maybe the good times will arrive”? here is long quote from holmes
“But more important to me than this was their sense of fantasy, of the malleable properties of their own lives. You could dismiss them as bar-flies, tellers of tall stories. But that is not what I saw. They were people not wholly different from a man like Trelawny, for whom the truth about themselves and others had to be given a mythic shape. Much of what they said was to do with what MIGHT have happened to them, what they wanted to happen rather than what actually happened. They lived in a kind of subjunctive mode, especially the past subjunctive; but this world of possibilities was no less part of them, part of their truth as personalities, than the more normal grammar of reality and the everyday recorded fact. We are what we dream, in the same way that we are what we eat. I began to realize that a biographer had to become fluent in this subjunctive language; to manipulate and interpret it with the same confidence as all the other tenses of the past. He should be neither drowned by it nor frightened of it. It was simply one more dialect of the past----dialect of the memory----that he would have to master.”

I think geoff dyer’s writing about being a writer and biographer are much more entertaining and funny and fun to read, but I think one could learn much more from holmes.
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage
Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I've ever read. It was assigned for a Stanford class in Biography. Following the footsteps of biographical subjects of the past, he relates their lives to contemporary
France (contemporary to the time of his writing, which spanned his ages 18 - 30).
From Library Journal
Follow the footsteps of this absorbing and delightful author as he attempts to trace the paths of four sometimes intractable, but always fascinating, Romantic writers. Robert Louis Stevenson's travels through the Cevennes with a donkey; Mary Wollstonecraft's revolutionary Paris and friends; Percy B. Shelley's Italian exile (a postscript to Holmes's acclaimed Shelley biography); and Gerard de Nerval's deranged vision and sad pilgrimage are all presented with rigor, charm, and historical and personal sleuthwork. Holmes's interest in each biographical subject is palpable and seems at times a fixation. But he rewards the reader with a growing understanding of each writer's life, as well as much insight into the technique and art of biography. Enjoyable, informative reading for literati, this book is recommended for larger general and academic collections. Carol J. Lichtenberg, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

[Diane Challenor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It was made up of four biographical feature stories related to the authors research. One about Robert Louis Stevenson, one about Mary Wollstonecraft and one about Percy Shelly. I enjoyed the first three stories very much. The fourth story was about Gerard de Nerval, a person I'm not familiar with, nor with the literary life of France in the 1800s, so I skimmed through the fourth story because I couldn't connect with it. that said, I love the way Richard Holmes writes and how he told these stories. Certainly worth the read.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a brilliant way to set about writing someone's biography (in this case, Robert Louis Stevenson):
follow his travels, step by step. Holmes creates a compelling double narrative of Stevenson's life and of his own attempt to understand it. Top notch!

[Rebecca]

I bought a secondhand copy because I’d heard this spoken about as a classic in biographical how-to. In the end I read most of the chapter on recreating Robert Louis Stevenson’s trek through the Cévennes, part of the following chapter on tracking down traces of Mary Wollstonecraft in Paris, and quickly skimmed the rest of the book. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough interest in Shelley or Gérard de Nerval (exactly, who?) to read about the research Holmes did into them.

Some favorite passages:

“It is the paradox that the more closely and scrupulously you follow someone’s footsteps through the past the more conscious do you become that they never existed wholly in any one place along the recorded path. You cannot freeze them, you cannot pinpoint them, at any particular turn in the road, bend of the river, view from the window. They are always in motion, carrying their past lives over into the future.”

“I have since come to believe that the re-creation of the daily, ordinary texture of an individual life—full of the mundane, trivial, funny and humdrum goings-on of a single loving relationship—in a word, the re-creation of intimacy—is almost the hardest thing in biography; and, when achieved, the most triumphant.”

“I mark my beginning as a professional biographer from the day when my bank bounced a cheque because it was inadvertently dated 1772.”

“The biographer often has to work, not with a tabula rasa, but with a powerfully received image of his subject, already unconsciously formed from the mass of previous work in the same field.”

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a crushingly brilliant book. Readers sometimes say it is hard to classify, but really it isn't. This is the autobiography of a biographer, and Holmes can tell the story of his life in only one way: by telling us the story of the biographies he's been compelled to write. Each chapter picks up the story at a new moment in his life. He begins a whippersnapper of eighteen, chasing Robert Louis Stevenson through les Cevennes, feeling the biographical itch beneath his skin. We meet him again in Paris in 1968, when his sudden passion for Mary Wollstonecraft awakes his desire to write, and again in Italy in 1972, when his obsession with Percy Bysshe Shelley breaks the tide and leads to his first great book, Shelley: The Pursuit.

I was initially unconvinced by the final chapter, set in 1976, when he describes researching the life of Gérard de Nerval. It seemed less vivid than the others. The impulses driving him to research Nerval were more intellectual. Holmes's own life that year was less picturesque. The mad ecstasy of his 18-year-old self, tramping through the wilds of France and dreaming of wolves, had given way to the professional writer, wondering what book to write next and drinking wine on moonlit balconies. But there is a fabulous twist to this final chapter, which I won't spoil, and which sheds a brilliant light on the craft and the curse of the biographer.

Holmes's prose is entrancing. In this autobiographical work, he is free to do what he can never do in his biographies, and include lots of dialogue. He has a real ear for it, and puts together a scene with the wit of Jane Austen. He manages to be genuinely idealistic and genuinely self-mocking. He describes nature with economy. He is an astute and non-judgmental observer of manners. He weaves his more philosophical and didactic reflections seamlessly into the narrative. In short, this book is every bit as absorbing as I'd been told it would be, and if you can put up with the odd untranslated sentence (or in one case, poem) in French, you'll love every word of it, whoever you are.

[Monique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Footsteps is an intriguing work tracing the captivating bohemian lives of Robert Louis Stevenson, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gerard de Nerval. Both author and reader are drawn dangerously/excitingly into solipsistic identification with these famous historical figures. But these moments of identification are recovered by factual accounts/details and also by the ongoing and intriguing commentary on the role and history of biographical writing itself. Implicit in the text is an argument about the inevitability of the author's own interests and investments influencing the nature of the research and outcome of biographical writing.

Through the stories Holmes traces the historical resonances and undercurrents of Western revolutionary political and artistic thinking. Rather than drawing any resolute conclusions, however, these stories are offered up as fragments for observation and reflection. It could be argued that ultimately this means their stories function only as fleeting moments of narcissistic identification. But even so, they provide a comforting sense of a shared bohemian cultural heritage, and find solace in the common failures and miseries of alienation, persecution, poverty and madness that are felt by artists who persist in living unconventional lives. Overall, the message I got was rather neutral: there are reasons for living conventionally, and reasons for living unconventionally. But it seems--from these quite personal histories--that the choice to go one way or the other is based on individual disposition rather than widespread social change or a particular historical moment.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magnificent achievement, both as book and as structure: the man can write, but the man can also bring together different strands, different angles almost effortlessly. Impressive indeed.
He handles a great wealth of material with real skill, while always conceptualising and asking questions beyond the immediate scope of the text.
I liked it more than (the yet excellent) Age of Wonder, and slightly less than Dr.Savage and Mr. Johnson: perhaps because I'm more interested in Johnson than in Shelley and the Romantics?
But as in these other works, Holmes himself is not interested in writing a straight biography; rather, he's trying to understand what a biography is, how it comes to be, and therefore, how we can come to know a man's (or a woman's) life, if at all.
How much of the biographer - the observer - is in the description of the one written about? Is objective understanding impossible? And would an obective understanding be any more real?
Being a Frenchman, the parts on Mary Wollnstonecraft and De Nerval were particularly interesting, but it's also because (and it's a minor 'but') the Shelley part I found a little bit repetitive, a little bit less focused - a little bit less intense, perhaps.
But it really is a wonderful book, an there's no need to be interested in biography as such, or even in those people Holmes writes about, to become absorbed in it. And in any case, it's certainly fascinating as a study on writing, on being a writer, and on the power of words and Literature.

[Brooke Salaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the approach of connecting biography to place, travel, walking, sleeping rough. The exploration of the lives of these romantic figures, poets, literary icons: Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Gerard de Nerval gave me new insights into the whole milieu they each occupied and their connectedness to their contemporaries, antecedents and successors. I was tremendously moved to learn of the small details Holmes captures so beautifully in rendering the essential humanity and remarkable bravery of each of his subjects. I'm eager to read his Shelley bio. He clearly had a deep affinity for Shelley in particular but his sympathy toward Mary
Shelley and her half sister Claire in their relative positions in his household but also their individual genius I thought Holmes did a good job of respectfully acknowledging. I enjoyed reading Claire's own words recounting her visit with PBS to the Roman Forum coming from someone with a wonderful poetic eye for detail and observation that was obviously borne of lively exchange with the heralded poet. Excellent and inspiring.

[Graham Hopwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Footsteps is a brilliantly-written amalgam of biography, travelogue and autobiography. His previous book, a seminal and peerless biography of Percy Shelley, more than qualified as Holmes' magnum opus. Yet Holmes was only 29 when Shelley: The Pursuit was published.
Another decade passed before his next major work, Footsteps, was published. In Footsteps Holmes gives us a series of mesmerising episodes in the lives of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley and Gerard de Nerval with plenty of walk-on parts for the likes of William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, and Theophile Gautier. Struggling to keep up but always present is Holmes himself. The pursuit continued. Romanticism never felt so real.

[Gerard Hogan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Am afraid I didn't enjoy this one. The author lost himself and me in the pursuit of the art of biography.
This may be a book for academics or professional biographers but the common man (me) was lost.

[Gavin Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating short biographical sketches by a master of the art. His stories of Bohemian Paris inspired me to create the TV series "The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne"

[Iain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant!

[Charlotte Latham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, lucid prose and fascinating accounts of the author's travels following the routes taken by the authors he is researching. It makes you want to visit the places yourself.

[Jwt Jan50 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holmes 'Age of Wonder' is on my TBR list and his works cropped up several times in my reading. So, I took a plunge on this one. The section on Stevenson and Wollstonecraft are easy 5's. Shelley, a 4. The last section on Nerval was a struggle.

'God, who has given us the love of women and the friendship of men, keep alive in our hearts the sense of old fellowship and tenderness; make offenses to be forgotten and services to be remembered; protect those whom we love in all things and follow them with kindness, so that they may lead simple and unsuffering lives, and in the end die easily with quiet minds.' RLS

'Friendship and domestic happiness are continually praised; yet how little is there of either in the world, because it requires more cultivation of mind to awake affection, even in our own hearts, than the common run of people suppose.' Mary Wollstonecraft

This is not for every reader. If you're a Stevenson fan and want more depth, or a quick introduction to the 'wealth' of Mary Wollstonecraft, or really aren't familiar with Shelley - then this is an interesting start. As well as learning more than you probably want to know about Holmes.

[Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reads like a series of time travelling dreams, each one allowing you to step into a hazy in-between time -- shifting between the 1800s and late mid-century 1900s -- following the steps of one man who follows the steps of another. I found the experience almost hypnotic at times.

Although most of the authors he writes of (Stevenson, Wollstonecraft, Shelley and Nerval) are British, Holmes tracks them through France. This movement through France -- and the time periods of the writers he followed -- oddly merged with my current reading of Les Miserable, which is set in France between 1815 and 1832.

I have had a lowkey reading theme for the past couple of years, following the writers (and gardeners) of the 1760s-1830s, and this book filled in spaces I hadn't known were empty. I don't know if this book would have the same impact on someone who hasn't been reading in the same time period, but for me, it was an almost uncanny experience and a truly satisfying one.

[AFMasten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the Stevenson part way back in 1985. Now that I'm working on a double-biography of two 1840s dancers, thought I'd see what insights about writing biography Holmes offers. The Wollstonecraft section was a revelation! I had no idea she was in France during the Revolution, or knew anything about her love life. She became a person rather than just the writer of the Rights of Women for me. The Shelly section was mostly unknown to me too, but not as compelling. The question of whether or not he and Claire had a child did not really interest me. And the Gerard de Nerval was totally new, as I'd never heard of him before. That section was simply too romantic. It showed me what I do not want to do with my protagonists. I do not want to try to get into their heads. I want their actions (which is all I have to go on anyway) to speak for them. So while this is still a fun book to read, I guess I don't want to be a romantic biographer.

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautifully written exploration of the lives, and the process of uncovering those lives, of R.L. Stevenson, Mary Woolstonecroft, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Gerard Nerval. I had heard nothing of the last named, though had come across the fragment of his poetry in The Waste Land.

The Stevenson chapter was by far and away the most enjoyable, perhaps because it was the experience of an 18 year old biographer full of romance and adventure. The Nerval was harder work, partly because I had a smaller frame of reference to work from and partly because his own insanity, and the way his insanity leeched into Holmes, whilst interesting also made for a more confusing chapter.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I loved this book, I absolutely adored it. The sections on Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Wollstonecraft are tremendous. Unfortunately, I found the Shelley section far less interesting, and the section on Nerval went on a bit long, although it was mostly engaging and rewarding. By writing about biography and art and career and creativity, Holmes is essentially talking about life. Apart from in the Shelley section, I found I could relate to the author or his subject.

Holmes writes beautifully, with very clear prose that invites the reader to empathise.

[Gabi Coatsworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book because the author describes the way he follows in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose travels have always fascinated me. Specifically, he recreates the path in “Travels through the Cevennes With a Donkey.”
During his walk, he muses about the way RLS presented his journey to the world and his critical father, and explains that the trip was what attracted him to become a biographer himself. I haven’t read the sections on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Paris, or Shelley’s Italian villages, but the section on TLS gave me food for thought.

[Judith Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this after reading about it in The Good Reading Guide. I loved it. It was about people I genuinely wanted to know more about (Nerval and his pet lobster had always intrigued me). It also made me want to read the Mary Wollstonecraft and the RL Stevenson.

I shall also, of course, be seeking out more works by this author.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pulling in and out of the role of biographer, Holmes explores what is means to chronicle a person’s life. Celebrating how they lived and their successes but also respecting what it means to assess their personal intrigues. Well written and very interesting to following his thoughts and insights as he traverses the haunts of four renowned writers.

[Jeff Keehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

A set of essays concerning the making of a biographer. Holmes starts with his youthful goal of following in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, moves on to a study of Mary Wollstonecraft, to Shelley and finally to Nerval. The essays are not excellent, but they are readable and interesting history. He ends with a very moving passage from the sad, terrible life of Nerval. 6-16-96

[mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

so if you have read as I have so many 18th and 19th century novels this is wonderful book tying the writers of the day to the century. so well written I am sorry I came upon it so late. I don't know if he is of my generation but I just identified with what he went through. Robert louis Stevenson Mary Wollenscraft ,Shelley just so interesting

[Brian K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four minibiographies featuring real-life literary detection as Richard Holmes followed the footsteps of Stevenson, Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Nerval. Packed with dense research but very entertaining nonetheless.

[Bev Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

Following the footsteps of Stevenson, Wollstonecraft, Shelley and Nerval in turn. Remarkably empathetic book - inspires further investigation.