Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer

In 1985 Richard Holmes published a book called Footsteps, and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mixture of travel, biographical sleuthing, and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains one of the most intoxicating and magical works of modern literary investigation ever written.

Now Holmes has put together a further and wonderfully revealing exploration of his biographical methods. Sidetracks is his personal casebook, assembled from decades of "wanderings from the straight and narrow" of his major biographies. It is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated him. "This is the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest," says Holmes, "a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject and the form to fit it."

Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities--French, English, Dutch, and American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and de Nerval, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, James Boswell and Robert Louis Stevenson, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda.

With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful, and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical thread: "To be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever."