...[an] exceptional biography ... This is a superb book, more tangly, obsessive and excitable than previous biographies, and in that sense more in tune with its subject. It is packed with interest from the early days in Bath with his mother to the last debt-ridden days in Edinburgh.
...[an] entertaining, intellectually brilliant biography ... Ms. Wilson’s biography, although chronological in presentation, isn’t a conventional cradle-to-graver. One of her most attractive qualities as a writer is a sensible disavowal of oracular omniscience ... [the] account of De Quincey’s relationship with Wordsworth enriches established facts with a sympathetic reconstruction of the poet’s effect on the young writer.
Guilty Thing captures that propulsion that drives De Quincey’s greatest writings ... But that’s not to say that Guilty Thing doesn’t also ably cover De Quincey’s life; nor does it lack the small nuggets of joy one expects from a good biography...But mostly Wilson’s book seeks to capture the rush and urgency of a life lived in extremis ... Yoking De Quincey’s life to Wordsworth’s Prelude has its weaknesses.
There have been many excellent biographies of De Quincey. Wilson’s is original by virtue of being primarily an investigation into the extraordinary 'palimpsest' of his mind ... One great question hovers over this exemplary book: Would De Quincey have been the greater had he abstained from toxins and conscientiously cultivated his talents? Frances Wilson’s answer seems a defiant no. The great experiment Thomas De Quincey undertook with his life and art is one of the dark glories of English literature.
[Wilson] sees the need for stylistic fireworks as well as steady scholarship to illuminate his life. She writes with speed, flamboyance, and constant changes of viewpoint and perspective, offset by moments of calm, shrewd analysis ... she brilliantly exploits the themes of impending violence, murderous hatred, and suspended terror in so much of De Quincey’s later work ... It is particularly for [the] daring passages that one admires this risky, sprightly, passionate biography, which goes further than anything previously in catching the strange, elusive Opium Eater, and which could never for a moment be mistaken for a blue commemorative plaque.
Wilson begins her account with the Ratcliffe murders, 'the point at which his life broke in half,' but this does not quite work. It is also a mistake to try to suggest De Quincey’s own apocalyptic view of London by borrowing occasional descriptions from more recent writers: they are anachronistic as applied to the city in the early 1800s. But these are minor flaws in a richly intelligent and well-informed study, which will surely become the favoured one for our time.
Wilson makes De Quincey a character so immediate you half expect him to materialize ... But Guilty Thing is short on literary analysis and long on dish; Wilson spends more words on De Quincey’s epic, late-life financial woes than on the Confessions themselves. Her De Quincey is more literary character than literary figure ... Wilson is refreshingly uninterested in explaining De Quincey’s character and behavior in light of contemporary understandings of addiction. This book is much more rewarding as a cautionary tale about the dangers of placing too much faith in art and as a jaundiced portrait of what it’s like to inhabit the fringes of greatness.
...[an] exquisite biography ... She follows De Quincey’s own approach of skipping 'the hackneyed roll-call' of a person’s life 'chronologically arranged,' and instead focuses on key incidents that shaped and obsessed him, many of these being 'scenes of terror, deluge and sudden death' ... Wilson chronicles De Quincey’s descent with admirable acuity, and her treatment of his literary output is equally sharp.
Wilson, who navigates De Quincey’s work with a concision that is the polar opposite of her subject’s restless prolixity, observes that there have been plenty of biographies of De Quincey, but her aim in Guilty Thing is to present the first 'De Quinceyan biography' ... attends less to the deep play-by-play of De Quincey’s life than to the obsessions that consumed him ... perhaps attention is being redirected in a promising way. Frances Wilson’s book will play no small part in this sublimely pleasant development.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
