{"product_id":"blackwing-book-stephen-drake-9781034157731","title":"Blackwing","description":"From the award-winning author of \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Wonder \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eFalling Upwards, \u003c\/i\u003ehere is a luminous meditation on the art of biography that fuses the author's own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime's obsession with his Romantic subjects. It has become for him a pursuit, or pilgrimage of the heart, that has taken him across three centuries, through much of Europe, and into the lively company of many earlier biographers. Central to this quest is a powerful and tender evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and some almost lost to history: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Sta l, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Z lide. Holmes also investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary bard William Blake. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e The diversity of Holmes's material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spirit--and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. \u003ci\u003eThe Long Pursuit \u003c\/i\u003egives us a unique insider's account of a biographer at work: traveling, teaching, researching, fantasizing, forgetting, and even ballooning. From this great chronicler of the Romantics now comes a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49576631795985,"sku":"GOR013686772","price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52580962861329,"sku":"GOR014555886","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1034157736.jpg?v=1751206154","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/blackwing-book-stephen-drake-9781034157731","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}