“[Holmes] does not so much write lives as haunt them; he seems to invade his subject’s dreams.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A glorious series of essays on the art of life writing. . . . Heaven for his fans [and] the best account imaginable for the richness of his form.” —The Observer
“I am a Richard Holmes addict. . . . Only Holmes, who is so deeply versed in the people and culture of eighteenth-century science, could tell these stories with such verve and resonance.” —Oliver Sacks
“Elegant. . . . Nobody has thought longer or harder about the nature of biography as a literary form than Holmes.” —Wall Street Journal
“Holmes’s style pleasingly resembles that of his fellow Englishman, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. Like that celebrated man of letters, Holmes comes across as contagiously curious, casually erudite, and just a bit daft. . . . In spending so much of his life chronicling the lives of poets, he has, to the delight of his readers, become one.” —The Christian Science Monitor
CONFESSIONS
1 Travelling 3
2 Experimenting 19
3 Teaching 45
4 Forgetting 71
5 Ballooning 95
RESTORATIONS
6 Margaret Cavendish 111
7 Zélide 133
8 Madame de Staël 153
9 Mary Wollstonecraft 169
10 Mary Somerville 197
AFTERLIVES
11 John Keats the Well-Beloved 219
12 Shelley Undrowned 243
13 Thomas Lawrence Revarnished 261
14 Coleridge Misremembered 279
15 William Blake Rediscovered 305
Acknowledgements 341
List of Illustrations 345
Index 349
