Read Shelley: The Pursuit Online
Authors: Richard Holmes
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Criticism, #European, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Poetry
Shelley: The Pursuit
RICHARD HOLMES
was born in London in 1945 and educated at Churchill College, Cambridge.
Shelley: The Pursuit
, his first book, appeared in 1974. It won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as “surely the best biography of Shelley ever written . . . an extraordinary achievement.” Among Holmes’s other works are a two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Coleridge: Early Visions
(1989) and
Coleridge: Darker Reflections
(1998);
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage
(1993); and
Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
(1985), which Michael Holroyd has called “a modern masterpiece which will be seen as revolutionary a work as Lytton Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians
.” Richard Holmes is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1992 was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Copyright © 1974, 1994 by Richard Holmes
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph: The grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Cimitero Protestante Porta San Paolo, Rome/Bridgeman Art Library
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Holmes, Richard, 1945 —
Shelley : the pursuit / Richard Holmes. — [New ed.].
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59017-037-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822. 2. Poets, English — 19th century — Biography. 3. Radicals — Great Britain — Biography.
4. Atheists — Great Britain — Biography. I. Title. II. Series.
PR5431.H65 2003
821’.7 — dc21
2003006573
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-570-5
v2.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
SHELLEY
The Pursuit
RICHARD HOLMES
NEW
YORK
REVIEW
BOOKS
New York
To Helen Rogan and Margaret Amaral
Contents
5. Irish Revolutionaries: 1812
9. A Poem and a Wife:
Queen Mab
1813
10. Three for the Road: Europe 1814
11. Bad Dreams: Kentish Town 1814
12. Up the River: Bishopsgate 1815
13. The Byron Summer: Switzerland 1816
15. The Garden Days: Marlow 1817
16. The Platonist: Bagni di Lucca 1818
17. An Evening with Count Maddalo: Venice
21. The Hothouse: Livorno 1819
22. The West Wind: Florence 1819
23. From the Gallery: Florence 1820
Illustrations
Section I
1. Field Place
(photograph by Adrian Holmes)
2. Sir Bysshe Shelley
(after the picture in the possession of Sir John Shelley, Bart.)
3. Sir Timothy Shelley
(Bodleian Library)
4. Lady Elizabeth Shelley
(Bodleian Library)
5. Margaret and Hellen Shelley
(Bodleian Library)
6. ‘The Nightmare’ by Henry Fuseli
(Frankfurter Goethe Museum)
7. Robert Southey
(National Portrait Gallery)
8. T. L. Peacock
(National Portrait Gallery)
13. Shelley’s Tan-yr-allt assailant
(Century Magazine)
14. William Godwin
(National Portrait Gallery)
Section II
16. Claire Clairmont
(Nottingham Public Libraries)
17. Byron
(National Portrait Gallery)
18. Chateau Chillon and Lac Leman
(Éditions Jaegar, Genève)
19. Leigh Hunt
(National Portrait Gallery)
20. John Keats
(National Portrait Gallery)
21. William Hazlitt
(National Portrait Gallery)
22. Ramasses II
(photograph by Adrian Holmes)
24. Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni
(Gall. Naz. d’Arte Antica, Roma)
25. ‘Massacre at St Peter’s’
(British Museum)
Section III
27. The Albergo
Tre Donzelle
, Pisa
29. Sleeping Hermaphrodite
(Museo Borghese, Roma)
30. A page of Shelley’s manuscript of stanzas 47–8 of ‘The Witch of Atlas’
(Bodleian Library)
31. Detail of sketch of Shelley by Edward Williams
(Bodleian Library)
32. Jane Williams
(Bodleian Library)
33. Shelley’s sketches on inside cover of Italian notebook
(Bodleian Library)
34. Mary in 1841
(National Portrait Gallery)
35. Faust and Mephistopheles ascend the Brocken on Valpurgisnacht
(British Museum)
36. Casa Magni, Lerici
(Unknown photographer, c.1870)
37. Manuscript sketch of the
Don Juan
and the
Bolivar (British Museum)
38. Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819
(National Portrait Gallery)
39. Bust of Shelley by Marianne Leigh-Hunt, 1836
(Eton College)
Photographs not attributed have been taken by the author.
Preface to the New Edition
This is a young man’s book. I completed it at the age of 29, the same age at which Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia. It shares something of the recklessness of its subject, the pursuer and the pursued. I think it should remain like that. It is an attempt to write literary biography as a form of modern epic, in which speed of action, colour and movement, travel and the sense of poetic adventure, predominate over everything else. ‘I always go on until I am stopped,’ said Shelley, ‘and I never am stopped.’ I still think this is the essential truth about his remarkable life, which continues so vividly into the present day, a restless and demanding presence for each younger generation to encounter.