Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer Book

Really, 4.5 stars. Like his previous autobiographical collection of sketches of the biographer's art, Holmes illuminates the "sidetracks" of writing about the lives of authors. This collection are a series of articles that Holmes wrote about intriguing footnotes to those larger works, a compendium of "B sides" as it were to his major works. Some of them are more interesting than others to me, but my favorites are masterpieces, particularly works on Shelley's last days before he drowned, the love story of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft - the philosopher and the feminist - as an allegory for the subsuming of the Age of Reason by the Age of Romanticism, an insightful look at how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda came to realize in 1930 that the days they romanticized in their novels were in the past and that they were "washed up", a brief biography of Voltaire and his loves, and a deeper look at Boswell, the godfather of the literary biography. Essential for deep readers of the Romantic era of literature.