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Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

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Biography as a journey through place, archives, and personal encounter

$18.51 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Biography as a journey through place, archives, and personal encounter

Footsteps brings together essays in which Richard Holmes approaches literary lives by physically following their traces. The supplied description places him on Robert Louis Stevenson’s route through the Cévennes and in Paris, where present-day experience intersects with the histories of Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft during the Revolution. Travel, biographical investigation, and memoir are presented as intertwined forms, making the book less a conventional life study than an exploration of how landscapes, documents, and a biographer’s own movements can shape an encounter with the past. Published alongside its companion volume, Sidetracks, it offers a compact view of Holmes’s exploratory approach to biography.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in literary biography and biographical method
  • Travel-essay readers drawn to journeys connected with writers’ lives
  • Readers interested in Robert Louis Stevenson, Wordsworth, or Mary Wollstonecraft

Themes

Literary biographyTravel and placeHistorical memoryResearch and personal memoirWriters’ lives

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Richard Holmes's great work of biographical exploration, published alongside its sister volume 'Sidetracks'.

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

Sleeping rough, he retraces Robert Louis Stevenson's famous journey through the Cevennes. Caught up in the Parisian riots of the 1960s, he dives back in time to the terrors of Wordsworth and of Mary Wollstonecraft marooned in Revolutionary Paris and then into the strange tortured worlds of G

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