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Shelley: The Pursuit
by: Richard Holmes

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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780007204588
ISBN: 0007204582
Label: HarperPerennial
Manufacturer: HarperPerennial
Number Of Pages: 848
Publication Date: October 03, 2005
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Studio: HarperPerennial
Sales Rank: 101781

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Shelley's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Editions)

Ode to the West Wind and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Truly great biography, not to be missed!!!!!!
Alongside, Juliet Barker's 'The Brontes', this is without doubt my favourite literary biography. Shelley simply steps off the page in this wonderful book. As Holmes says himself, this is not a book for Shelley lovers, but as an ardent admirer of Shelley and his work myself, I wouldn't want to read a book that hero worships and is not willing to criticise. Here we meet the real Shelley, a flawed, often selfish man, but at the same time a great thinker ahead of his time, passionate and intelligent.
I particularly enjoyed reading about his relationship with the women in his life, notably for me Claire Claremont and Harriet Westbrook. Harriet is often dismissed in the shadow of Mary Shelley as purely Shelley's first wife who killed herself, ... Read More:

Rating:

- Shelley without sentiment?
Many in the literary world have given this book a positive review since it first appeared in the early 1970's. It is a wonderfully deep and engrossing book, both a damn good read and on the face of it an admirable work of research.

So I noted with curiosity that the editors of the excellent "Shelley's Poetry & Prose" (Norton Critical Edition) referred to The Pursuit in unflattering terms; "Imaginative and lively life, marred by factual errors, by a journalist-scholar with limited sympathy for PBS's poetry". These scholars should be in a good position to judge but "journalist-scholar" has a whiff of academic snobbishness about it and the charge of "limited sympathy" seems to communicate more the pique of someone for whom Shelley has ... Read More:

Rating:

- Shadows of the Mind
For sheer application and scholarship, Richard Holmes's 'Shelley - The Pursuit' (Harper Perennial, 2005) certainly merits its accolades and acclaim (it was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974 when originally published).

Holmes does what every good biographer should do. He has not only read impressively widely on his subject but has also gone back to, at least some, original sources. It always worries me when writers of this genre limit their source-material solely to previous biographies. Inevitably, the arguments presented within wear all the hues of the author's own particular prejudices, perceptions and experiences, themselves limited by the author's own development. Researching original sources in addition to the established ... Read More:

Rating:

- One of the best biographies I have read
I'm not a great fan of biographies usually, but I love Shelley and Byron and had heard great things about this one and so gave it a go - and I'm so pleased I did! It's vivid, articulate, intelligent and really gets under the skin of the subjects.

Shelley leaps off the page in all his daemonic intelligence and ambivalence, as does Mary Shelley, Byron and Claire Clairmont. I found myself slowing down towards the end both because I didn't want to reach the conclusion that I knew had to happen, and also because I just didn't want the book to end.

With so many biographies I find it difficult to actually picture the subjects as real people with an inner life of their own, but that's just one of the things that Richard Holmes conveys ... Read More:

Rating:

- Reads like a great saga
I have always enjoyed the poetry of Percy Shelley, but never really took a closer look at the man behind Prometheus Unbound. I came across this biography by chance and thought I'd give it a go. It was definitely worth it. It reads like a great epic, and is a true page-turner, you just can't wait to read what will happen next. From author notes in anthologies I always thought Shelley was a mild, liberal, extremely good-natured example of a human being, but this biography presents him as a sort of quasi-demon, a man imbued with good and evil just like everyone else; at times a seducer, an egoist, a libertine. As with all biographies, you will never know whether it is the truth of the man that Shelley was, but like all novels, this must be read for pleasure ... Read More:

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