Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives

by Daisy Hay

Overview

Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspective—celebrating their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism. The book focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of fascinating lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley's stepsister and Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt's botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon and Joseph Severn; and writers such as Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas Love Peacock, and William Hazlitt. They were characterized by talent, idealism, and youthful ardor, and these qualities shaped and informed their politically oppositional stances. "In firm, clear, often elegant prose, [Daisy Hay] narrates the main events in the lives of her subjects from 1813, when they began to coalesce around Hunt in London, till 1822" (Ben Downing, The New York Times Book Review).

Young Romantics is an enthralling tale of love, betrayal, sacrifice, and friendship played out against a backdrop of political turbulence and intense literary creativity. "Hay's account of the passionate and messy lives of her Romantics is vivid, picturesque, and finely told" (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374532932
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/29/2011
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Daisy Hay is the author of Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives (FSG, 2010) and has a PhD in English literature from Cambridge University.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

Preface xiii

Part 1 Creating a Coterie

1 Husbands 3

2 Wives and Mistresses 43

3 Sisters 69

4 Children 109

Part 2 Italy and England

5 Counts and Cockneys 141

6 Exiles 166

7 Travellers 195

8 Corsairs 217

Part 3 After the Storm

9 The Future 247

10 The Present 274

11 The Past 297

Notes 313

Select Bibliography 331

Acknowledgements 341

Index 345

Editorial Reviews

[Hay] is a skilled and surefooted chronicler. In firm, clear, often elegant prose, she narrates the main events in the lives of her subjects from 1813, when they began to coaslesce around Hunt in London, till 1822, when Shelley drowned near Livorno, Italy.” —Ben Downing, The New York Times Book Review

“By assembling a great cast and exploring their high dramas, the author has given us a feast of a book.” —Edna O'Brien

“The originality of this engrossing narrative comes from Daisy Hay's unusual focus on the passionate allegiances and literary influences between her characters. With great skill she weaves in and out of the lives of these poets, novelists, and philosophers, their husbands, wives, lovers, and children, exploring the dual nature of the creative impulse, its individuality, and the stimulus of kindred spirits. It is a most impressive achievement.” —Michael Holroyd

“This erudite volume brings the second-generation Romantics entertainingly and vividly to life.” —Duncan Wu

“Young Romantics is an enthralling tale of love, betrayal, sacrifice, and friendship played out against a backdrop of political turbulence and intense literary creativity. And "Hay's account of the passionate and messy lives of her Romantics is vivid, picturesque, and finely told.” —Richard Eder, The Boston Globe

From the Publisher

…[Hay] is a skilled and sure-­footed chronicler. In firm, clear, often elegant prose, she narrates the main events in the lives of her subjects…Moving swiftly and purposefully, her story has no longueurs whatsoever, nor even a single lurching transition; it represents a triumph of artful selection and synthesis. If you want to read a single book of modest length on the lives (less so the work) of the later Romantics, this might very well be the one.
—The New York Times

Ben Downing

A prosopography of Keats, Shelley, Byron and others. Successful biographers must balance density of detail with narrative flow. Cambridge-educated Hay adds the further challenge of documenting not one life, but those of several friends and acquaintances within the admittedly narrow social milieu of the so-called "Young Romantics." Her thesis concerns the impact of a close circle of friends upon the work that these young talents produced. True to the group's reputation, their lives involved enough wild abandon, steamy liaisons, elopements, intrigue, incest, love triangles, illegitimate children and passionate death to fill the pages of several novels. Though familiar and less-familiar characters move in and out of the chronological narrative, Hay spends the most time on the exploits of Shelley and Mary Godwin, whom the reckless poet whisked away in scandal while he was still married to another woman, and their entourage. This approach suggests that an artist's leisure-class coterie-particularly in the early 19th century, when sociability was discussed and pursued as an art in itself-influenced, nurtured and challenged his or her work in significant ways. The author devotes few pages to analyses of the individual works; instead, she weaves a complex background of what was going on when many of these works were written and how those personal events worked their way into the poetry. Some of Shelley's most beloved poems, for instance, weren't penned on a bleak promontory but during spirited sonnet contests with his quill-wielding cronies. Though marketed to a general readership, the book hardly seems suitable for anyone but avid readers of literary history or students of Romantic poetry. For that audience, though, Hay offers an engaging model for biographical study, enabling heretofore unacknowledged players in the drama of the Young Romantic poets' lives to have their say. Intelligent and intricate, though occasionally dull.

Kirkus Reviews