A writer's writer who will no doubt inspire her own cult following
Amanda Foreman Stunning ... A brilliant, giddy-making portrait ... Wilson's narrative [has] a wonderfully hallucinatory effect ... Energetic and wonderfully compelling
Kathryn Hughes
Mail on Sunday
In connecting the architecture of De Quincey's wild, opium-fuelled mind with physical surroundings, Wilson provides a handrail through ... Read morethe pandemonium and isolation. He emerges from her book a sympathetic but irresponsible obsessive... Wilson has successfully brought De Quincey out from under the shadow of his contemporaries. He stands before us deeply flawed ... But he was also a dreamer of the best dreams in literature
Ruth Scurr
Daily Telegraph
A richly intelligent and well-informed study, which will surely become the favoured one of our time
Financial Times
Tremendous ... A seamless, stirring, sublime biography, which takes you to the heart, or rather the head, of the opium-eater. Whether you are more repelled or mesmerised by him, it's hard to dispute that De Quincey was the most complex and unpredictable writer of his times
Evening Standard
Multilayered and wonderfully insightful
John Walsh
Sunday Times
A book that captures in both form and focus something of its subject's disorienting, brilliant unpredictability ... There are plenty of stylistic fireworks worthy of De Quincey here. Comets whiz through the pages, as do snippets of poetry, narrative diversions and gruesome details of the various contemporary murders by which De Quincey was fascinated ... The result is a great, complicated book, in which a host of competing ideas and images jostle for supremacy
Observer
Guilty Thing brings triumphantly into focus a life racked by opium's insidious effects ... Beautifully crafted, Frances Wilson's narrative sets up patterns, mirrors and doublings that make multiple intersections between De Quincey's inner and outer worlds. An impressive contribution to literary biography, her book amounts to the most `De Quinceyan' account of De Quincey we are likely to see
Literary Review
Wilson is forensic about the terrors lurking in De Quincey's imagination ... Wilson's quirky, urgent biography, which is clearly steeped in extensive knowledge of the period, is an essential guide to this remarkable drug addict
Daisy Goodwin
The Times
By turns amused, appalled and empathetic, Wilson paints such a riveting multi-tonal portrait that one ends up with a strong regard for De Quincey's rare vision but at the same time an absolute certainty one would not invite him to dinner ... She beautifully binds and catches us in the web of his imagination ... In her pursuit, Wilson often catches decisively this most elusive character, and the chase is exhilarating
Hermione Eyre
Spectator
Wonderfully insightful
Sunday Times
It is, like its subject's own best work, written with studied panache, respectful irreverence and relish of the macabre
Glasgow Herald
A superb, excitable biography ... Exceptional ... De Quincey's shifting relationship with Coleridge and Wordsworth is central to the book ... Wilson's other great theme is his obsession with murder ... This is a superb book, more tangly, obsessive and excitable than previous biographies, and in that sense more in tune with its subject
Book of the Week
Guardian
Artful and nuanced ... As complex, intriguing and multifarious as the Last of the Romantics himself
Prospect
Excellent ... A riveting glimpse into the opium-marinated Victorian age and its tormented Romantic geniuses. De Quincey's story is stranger and more confounding than most fiction
The Lady
Exhilarating ... Startling ... Inventive ... Wilson circumscribes her subject in an ingeniously De Quinceyan fashion ... What distinguishes [the biography's] achievement is Wilson's ability to mirror the mercurial texture of De Quincey's own selective and thrillingly digressive way of telling a story ... Her remarkable book engenders in its readers those modes of thinking necessary to follow De Quincey as he shifts unpredictably into and out of every shape
Times Literary Supplement
Brilliantly possessed
Andrew Motion
Observer
An ingeniously structured biography of a brilliant, ridiculously self-destructive man, and a beautifully written cultural history full of arresting insights into celebrity and hero-worship and the public's prurient fascination with violence
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Observer
I'm as addicted to Frances Wilson's writing as her latest subject, Thomas de Quincey, was to opiates, Romantic poets and murder. Guilty Thing is an irresistible journey through the life of the obsessive, anarchic original flaneur. Borges said De Quincey was an almost infinite world of literature in one man. Wilson succeeds in conjuring this world in one exhilarating, rigorous and humorous book that is the most enjoyable journey into hell you're ever likely to take
Rachel Holmes
Guardian
Thrilling, chilling and frequently funny, this superlative biography tells the story of De Quincey's various obsessions: Wordsworth, murder, and the divine luxuries of opium . Addictive reading
Books of the Year
Sunday Times
Wilson's prose has some of the same hallucinatory loveliness that De Quincey used in his verse and journalistic essays, and the result is thrillingly immersive
Kathryn Hughes
Guardian, 'Books of the Year'
A brilliant, giddy-making, hallucinatory portrait
Books of the Year
Mail on Sunday
From every aspect the year's most spirit-stirring biography is Frances Wilson's Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
Books of the Year
Times Literary Supplement
Like De Quincey himself, Frances Wilson has the capacity to make us look again at something we thought we'd already seen
Paul Muldoon
Times Literary Supplement
Frances Wilson's sympathetic, clever and well-wrought biography of Thomas De Quincey, Guilty Thing makes him start and startle as never before
Andrew Motion
Guardian
Exceptionally rich
Gaby Wood
Daily Telegraph
Wilson's quirky biography, clearly steeped in an extensive knowledge of the period, is an essential guide to this remarkable drug addict
Daisy Goodwin
The Times
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