Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer Book

Richard Holmes is on my personal short list of the very best nonfiction writers living today. The man is amazing. He seems to be incapable of making false steps. It was three years ago that I read my first Holmes title, The Age of Wonder, and I still refer to it all the time. It's a masterpiece. Falling Upwards, if less ambitious, was almost as rewarding, and more fun.

I'm moving now into Holmes' back catalog with Footsteps, and my admiration only grows. Holmes is primarily known as a biographer of the Romantic generation (Shelley and Coleridge in particular) and this wonderful book is - well, what is it? It's a book of biography, of history, a memoir, and a coming of age story. You might call it, perhaps, a "memoir of biography."

In Footsteps Holmes touches on his own youthful inspiration by and (I think it's fair to say) disillusionment with the revolutionary protest movements of the late 1960s and early '70s through the lens of his personal obsessions with Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Gérard de Nerval. Along the way Holmes charts his almost reluctant embrace of the biographer's calling and explores the values and limits of a life dedicated to the pursuit of (in his word) "ghosts."

This is just an excellent book. Well written and expertly constructed, it recounts the lives of some rather divergent historical figures, but tells in compelling fashion a single, unified story of personal adventure, youthful idealism, and the dangers of obsession and solipsism. I would suggest that in an oblique way it's also a meditation on the power and shape-shifting nature of human love.