Scott on Zelide - Portrait of Zelide by Geoffrey Scott

Zelide 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 Zelide''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.

About the author

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge.

In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as ‘surely the best biography of Shelley ever written’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014.

He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Geoffrey Scott (1884 –1929) was an English scholar and poet, known as a historian of architecture. His biography of Isabelle de Charrière entitled The Portrait of Zelide won the 1925 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He was also the editor of James Boswell’s papers, and a prominent figure in social and intellectual circles in London, Florence and New York.

Product details

• Authors: Richard Holmes, Geoffrey Scott
• Assisted by: Richard Holmes (Editor)
• Publisher: Harper Perennial UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 17.05.2004
• EAN: 9780007111732
• ISBN: 978-0-00-711173-2
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 12 mm
• Subjects: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical, Biography: historical, political & military, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Dutch, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Biography: historical, political and military, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form, Zélide;Boswell