Volume 33, Number 6 · April 10, 1986
False Scents
By Robert M. Adams
Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
by Richard Holmes
Viking, 288 pp., $18.95
Buoyant, adventurous, intimate, vivid, and occasionally silly are some preliminary adjectives to describe Footsteps, a book about a biographer in pursuit of his subjects. Richard Holmes is the author of a life of Shelley, published in 1974. Part of the present volume describes the research and writing that went into that book. In addition, there are three separate essays, on Mary Wollstonecraft, on Gérard de Nerval, and on a two-week walk through the Cévennes on the trail of Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey Modestine. The common theme is the effort to understand, even to resurrect briefly, figures from the distant past; it will occasion no surprise that some of the essays turn out better than others.
Review, 2044 words
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