Jackie McGlone

BEFORE I meet the biographer Richard Holmes, I receive an email asking me to bring a Scottish £10 note to our interview. As such requests go, it’s one of the oddest I’ve received – and there have been a few.

Henrietta Moraes, who modelled for Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, wanted oranges and chocolate and then I had to walk her dog, while the great Arthur Miller required the finest Scottish shortbread.

But a crisp, new £10 note? Literary payola? Of course not. The prize-winning, bestselling “Romantic biographer” is keen to lay hands on one of the new Royal Bank of Scotland £10 notes featuring the head of Scottish-born mathematician Mary Somerville, an under-appreciated woman who – like astronomer Caroline Herschel and novelist Mary Shelley – has been excluded from science.

It seems, however, that Somerville’s popular reputation is spreading once again, as is her symbolic image, writes Holmes. He will be speaking at the Boswell Book Festival next weekend about his latest book, The Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer, a collection of lectures and essays he describes as “a declaration of faith”, in which he explores the lives of women writers and scientists, some well known, some almost lost. His old heroes appear too – Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, William Blake, as well as the scientists he wrote about in his earlier bestseller The Age of Wonder, his mission there to uncover “scientific passion in all its manifestations.”

In The Long Pursuit, a marvellous reflection on the role of memory in the biographer’s art and craft of which he is one of the greatest living exponents, Holmes, 71, writes, “Biographies are understood to write themselves, self-generated (like methane clouds) by their dead subjects.” The genial and utterly charming Holmes’ quest – it seems serendipitous that he should share his surname with a great detective – is to give the lie to this notion and to go everywhere that his subjects “had ever lived or worked, or travelled or dreamed.” He calls it the “footsteps principle,” a literary mash up of memoir and biography. Indeed, this book is the final volume of a trilogy that began with his classic, Footsteps, and continued with the masterly Sidetracks.

Biography, he believes, is “a simple act of complex friendship” and “a handshake across time, but also across cultures, across beliefs, across disciplines, across genders and across ways of life.”

And here we are shaking hands with Mary Somerville. “What a woman!” we exclaim almost in unison as he tells how an imposing bust of her has finally been moved into the Royal Society’s research library, alongside busts of Faraday and Darwin. In 2014, she got a dramatic cameo in Mike Leigh’s award-winning film, Mr Turner, advising the painter on the scientific analysis of light as a form of electromagnetic wave. As for her appearance on a £10 note, “Perhaps this too is biography by other means,” Holmes.

The new plastic notes are not being issued until later this year so I fail in my task. Nonetheless, we decide, over coffee in a London club, that we will concentrate on Somerville, although other scientific and literary women he considers in The Long Pursuit include Margaret Cavendish, Germaine de Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Dutch intellectual Zelide. She turned down James Boswell’s proposal of marriage on strictly literary grounds. “She wrote back, Mr Boswell, ‘I cannot marry you because your translations from the French are not good enough.’ I must remember to tell this story at the Boswell Book Festival,” Holmes says.

He will, of course, also talk about Somerville as well as assessing the role of biographies in the evolving reputations of their subjects. “Mary was extraordinary,” he enthuses. “Thank heavens she has finally got to the £10 note. I became very interested in her through my book about the Romantic Scientists, The Age of Wonder, where she appears at the end with her book, On the Connection of the Physical Sciences. I thought, ‘There is much more to this than meets the eye,’ because she actually wrote the first popular general science book in 1834. She was also the first person to be referred to as a scientist by a reviewer of that book.

“I thought, ‘Who was this woman? I need to know more.’ I just got very caught up in her story. This wild childhood she had in Burntisland on the Firth of Forth. She called herself "a little savage," roaming the beach – a naturalist was being born. At the age of 15, she discovered little algebra problems in the back of a fashion magazine.

“Her brother was studying Euclid, so she asked if she could sit in. There was a lot of mockery in the family, but she had a natural gift. She was very clever yet she hid her amazing scientific abilities. Everybody said, she was no blue stocking. She hated the Edinburgh school she was sent to – they had to walk around with copies of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary on their heads. Disastrously married to a naval officer, she was widowed and returned to Edinburgh, the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment. Then she found her true soulmate, her cousin William Somerville.”

Clearly, William adored her, adds Holmes, who lives with his adored “partner of 25 years and six weeks, my beloved novelist, Rose Tremain.”

We talk at length about Somerville’s many brilliant achievements, which are too many and too astonishing to list here – “Sorry for the great spiel about her! I am so enthusiastic!” exclaims Holmes, adding that Somerville, a mother of three who died in Naples, was refused burial in Westminster Abbey (not aristocratic enough), although she received a different kind of living memorial when Somerville College, Oxford, was founded in her memory in 1879. Her plain marble tomb in the English cemetery in Naples survives today, topped by full-size statue of her seated on a mathematical throne.

“It is sadly neglected,” sighs Holmes. “I must draw the college’s attention to this... as you can see, I am certainly not done with her. I am fascinated to know which image they will use on the £10 note – she was also a gifted artist. A beautiful self-portrait is reproduced in my book.”

What of Holmes’s self-portrait? After all, he conceived a unique course in life writing at the University of East Anglia where he was professor of biographical studies from 2001-2007.

Born in Ealing, London, and educated at Downside and Cambridge, he’s a beguiling character. His solicitor father was a Catholic; his mother wasn’t. Pamela Gordon was a children’s writer and “a good poet,” who combined both by supplying the text, in rhyme, for a DC Thomson comic strip, My Baby Brother, in which the bespectacled infant Richard once appeared, reading Coleridge. “There’s an albatross on the cover!” (The adult Holmes’s book, Coleridge: Darker Reflections won a raft of awards.)

The first Romantic novelist Holmes encountered, however, was Robert Louis Stevenson in stories read to him by his mother, who had Scottish roots. “I remember that so well, her sitting on the end of the bed reading A Child’s Garden of Verse before I could read. I still have those poems in my head.”

It was Stevenson who launched his career as a biographer. “My God, I have been doing this for 50 years,” he says suddenly, recalling setting off for south-central France, with his backpack, at 18, believing himself to be on the trail of Robert Louis. In Footsteps, he writes that he cut a ludicrous figure, fossicking and foraging about, shredding the French language as pear juice streamed down his face. “I suppose a foreign affaire de coeur would have been the best thing of all; and that, in a way, was what I got.” A lifetime devoted to the lives of others? “Exactly!” he says, with a beaming smile, producing the double-sided notebook in which he is working on his next book. The label on the front reads, “Vic Sci.” “I am not done with early Romantic Scientists,” he confesses.

Nor is he done with Keats – he’s dashing off to the BBC where he is making a programme about the poet, The Echoing Nightingale. “One of the extraordinary things about Keats is he is not dead. He’s still alive to so many people – his story is still being written. Death is not the end of the human story. The dead always have more life, more time, to give us.”

The Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes (William Collins, £25). Richard Holmes is at the Boswell Book Festival, Dumfries House, Ayrshire, on May 13 at 6.15. The Herald is media partner of the festival