Passion

A novel that tracks the lives of the women of the great Romantic poets offers a fantastic opportunity to look at the men themselves. The great, doomed triad of Byron, Shelly and Keats springs to life when seen through the eyes of women's love and disillusionment. But this book belongs to their women. From histrionic, narcissistic Lady Caroline Lamb to fierce and flirtatious Fanny Brawne, they are all here. The characterization is satisfying and detailed. Every woman is completely imagined, even the more subsidiary characters like Lady Annabella Byron and Fanny Godwin. This complex, informative novel offers an excitingly fresh perspective on the period and people it depicts. The variations in narrating voice, POV and style keeps the story from feeling overly linear. Very highly recommended.

Beautifully written, Morgan manages to channel an intelligent 19th century voice while telling a riveting tale about some wild 19th century celebrities. I absolutely could not put this book down and left their world behind only because the book had to end.

At 663 pages this is an extremely long book - but then it more or less has to be, for Morgan's huge ambition is that it should describe the lives and complex relationships of no fewer than seven central characters: Augusta Leigh, half-sister of Lord Byron, with whom she had an incestuous relationship; Caroline Lamb, wife of the future Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and who also had an affaire with Byron; Claire Claremont, who bore one illegitimate daughter to Byron and (possibly)another to Shelley (though in this novel the suggestion is that the mother was not Claire but a nursemaid for Shelley's other children); Claire's step-sister Mary, both of whom eloped with the then still married Shelley and lived in an uneasy ménage à trois with him, even after Shelley and Mary were able to marry; and Fanny Brawne, engaged to Shelley's friend John Keats. (This last relationship, touching though it is, is rather marginal to the intricate web that connects the other characters in the book.) The lives of these women, from childhood onwards, are told in alternating sections, and it is only quite late in the novel that one gets a sense of how they are all interconnected. Augusta, Caroline and Mary (and Byron himself) each have a complicated network of relatives, and the book would certainly have benefitted from a series of family trees, which the reader has to construct for himself. Their stories are told against a richly detailed social and political background of the period (from the 1780s to the 1820s), including such information as that the gentry above-stairs had the rooms lit by candles in the evening, while below-stairs they were lit by rushes - that sort of thing. The women in this novel have all grown up in the period of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. They are women of great character, sparklingly articulate and willing to be unconventional. `Society' disapproved when their unconventional behaviour was too public (their parents' and even their grandparents' generation had themselves challenged conventions in their time), but the disapproval was nothing like as stifling as it would be during the next two or three generations, in the Victorian Age - when the `cant' so excoriated by Byron got the upper hand: the thesis also of Ben Wilson's new book `Decency and Disorder, 1789 to 1837'. And yet the women do suffer, not so much from society's disapproval which they do not much mind, but Caroline, Augusta and Claire for having given their hearts to Byron, and Mary for having given her heart to Shelley. Shelley emerges in this novel as having given a soft heart to too many women; Byron as possibly having loved Augusta but really none of the other women of whose infatuation with him he took advantage, only to cast them off when he had tired of them. He really was a shocker; but one comes to understand how he was driven by his daemon: at one point he says that the first thing he truly hates is himself. At the end we have sorro

Jude Morgan has just become a favorite author of mine. Her novels are engaging from the first sentence, and continue to be just as engaging throughout the novel. I am generally not a fan of short stories or multiple stories within one book. In "Passion", there are 4 stories being told simultaneously, and it did not bother me at all. They flowed together, without blending of details. Each character has her own unique personality, which stands out, helping to keep each character's tale separate. Unlike most books that have several story lines going on, "Passion" was able to make each story engaging and interesting, and not leave the reader at a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter. I was not too familiar with any of the characters, save Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, and mostly by name. Jude Morgan managed to capture a unique perspective on her life and feelings without fictionalizing too much. In general, this novel was one of the best I have read in the last few years. It was not predictable or historical romance, which is what I had been reading as of late, but instead I got a pleasant surprise of a well written first novel. Buy this book, I do not think you will be disappointed!

I've been recommending Morgan's wonderful novel to everyone I know who might find it interesting. Despite the subtitle (A Novel of the Romantic Poets), Passion focuses more on the women in their lives. Morgan creates believeable personalities for Mary Shelley, Augusta Leigh, Lady Caroline Lamb, Claire Clairmont, and Fanny Brawne, allowing us to se inside their minds, and he manages to avoid the melodramatic drek that so many novels about the Romantics wallow in. I did not find it hard to follow (as other reviewers mentioned). Yes, the narrative shift among the points of view of the women, but these passages are linked by the men's admitation for one another and their shared passion for poetry and revolution. I was compelled to read Morgan's The King's Touch (not quite as good) and am waiting for Indiscretion and Symphoney to become available in the US.