Holmes’s “This Long Pursuit” is itself a complement to two earlier volumes: “Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer” (1985) and “Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer” (2000). All three are, essentially, collections of essays, talks, reminiscences and reviews held together by their author’s description of himself as a “romantic biographer.” That phrase carries multiple meanings: While Holmes’s field is, roughly, England in the age of Coleridge, he sometimes writes about romantic figures of other nations and periods (poet Gérard de Nerval, novelist Robert Louis Stevenson) and he himself clearly possesses an adventurous, romantic spirit.
In this new book’s first essay, “Travelling,” Holmes suggests that “biography is not merely a mode of historical enquiry. It is an act of imaginative faith.” To attain the requisite empathy, he early on adopted two key practices. The first he called the Footsteps principle. “I had come to believe that the serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past,” he explains. “Mere archives were not enough. He must go to all the places where the subject had ever lived or worked, or travelled or dreamed.” The biographer must then try to grasp their impact on his subject. “He must step back, step down, step inside the story.”
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