Book description
'Lives that Never Grow Old' is a wonderful series- edited by Richard
Holmes - that recovers the great classical tradition of English
biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to
read and vividly alive.
Zélide lived in her father's moated castle in Holland, like a fairytale
princess in a tower. She was the clever, sexy, mercurial young Dutch
blue-stocking with whom Boswell fell disastrously in love in 1764. The
rest of Zélide's story was unknown until the brilliant young Boswell
scholar Geoffrey Scott pieced it together from her intimate letters and essays.
Subsequent affairs with a cynical cavalry officer, a celebrated but
vacillating writer (aptly named Benjamin Constant), and a thoroughly
reliable music master, took her eventually to another fairytale mansion
in Switzerland. This tender, funny, faintly salacious portrait of a
'belle-esprit' is one of the most exquisite biographical miniatures ever
written. Richard Holmes is Professor of Biographical Studies at the
University of East Anglia, and editor of the Harper Perennial series
Classic Biographies launched in 2004. His is a Fellow of the British
Academy, has honorary doctorates from UEA and the Tavistock Institute,
and was awarded an OBE in 1992.
His first book, 'Shelley: The Pursuit', won the Somerset Maugham Prize
in 1974. 'Coleridge: Early Visions' won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the
Year, and 'Dr Johnson & Mr Savage' won the James Tait Black Prize.
'Coleridge: Darker Reflections', won the Duff Cooper Prize and the
Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography,
'Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer' in 1985, and
'Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer' in 2000. His most
recent book 'The Romantic Poets and their Circle' was published by the
National Portrait Gallery in 2005. He lives in London and Norwich with
the novelist Rose Tremain.
