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

This is a brilliant book but be warned; the Kindle version does NOT include the sixteen pages of illustrations found in the hardcover version.

Light on literary analysis - which is amply available elsewhere - and long on thoroughly documented anecdote, this is a terrifically entertaining and insightful collective biography of the Shelley-Byron circle, focusing primarily on the Shelley-Mary-Claire-Byron quadrangle and tailing off quickly after Shelley's death. Keat's inclusion in the book seems somewhat incidental, but Hay's narrative of more shadowy figures such as Leigh Hunt, Vincent Novello and their families provides interesting background for more famous figures. As always, the idealistic Shelley is simultaneously lovable and infuriating, Byron a self-centered monster, and Mary Shelley and her step-sister Claire are given a more balanced and sympathetic analysis than I have read elsewhere.

After years of reading about the English Poets I finally got some kind of clarity about what they were all about. Makes Shelley look like the sicko anxious skat-about that he really was, and brings clarity to the angst he put his female companions through throughout his breath life. Finally a real version, or vision of what he was all about. Genius included. And his playmates, included. It was , is nice to ginally get a handle on what really happened.

This book retells the well-known story of the entangled lives of the poets Shelley, Byron and Keats from a slightly new perspective. By focusing on the social circles surrounding the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt in which all three poets figured at one time or another, the author argues against the traditional view of the "solitary poet declaiming alone on the mountain top or sitting in solitary isolation pondering a bird's song." On the contrary, insists Daisy Hay, this generation of romantic poets viewed poetry as a powerful political weapon. Far from working in isolation, they sharpened their intellects and forged their artistic identities through friendship, conversation and sociability. "They talked to each other, fought with each other, hated each other and fell in love. Their stories demonstrate that friendship is not always easy; that relationships with other people can simultaneously be a source of great strength and unknowable pain. But they also show that friendship can be the making of the main," Hay writes. Hay's thesis is not completely convincing and she sometimes strains too hard to prove it. Still, she has produced an engaging group biography about a generation of fascinating men and women while supplying a useful corrective to the traditional view of their lives. Leigh Hunt has faded into semi-obscurity because his journalistic work was by its nature ephemeral. But his relationship with Percy Bysse Shelley forms the fulcrum around which this book revolves. Byron was an early supporter of Leigh Hunt and later a failed business partner. He and Shelley were linked by their lovers and came together from time to time in Switzerland and Italy. Keats had a only a tenuous connection to their group. He was briefly in Leigh Hunt's circle but soon broke away in order to find his own voice. Hunt was a terrible manager of money and, like all the characters in this book, led a mixed-up personal life. While devoted to his wife, Marianne, he also seems to have carried a torch for her sister, Bess, apparently unconsummated. Shelley himself was married to the rather dull Harriet, by whom he had two children, when he met the brilliant, beautiful, intellectual Mary Godwin, then 16, with whom he eloped. Two years later, the 21-year-old Harriet committed suicide by drowning herself. This is the just first of an amazing catalogue of untimely death and personal tragedy this book encompasses. One of Mary's half-sisters, Fanny, also committed suicide, while Bess also tried to drown herself but failed. Keats of course died of tuberculosis aged 26; Shelley drowned in a sailing accident aged 29; Byron made it to the age of 36 and died of disease and medical malpractice in Greece. Mary Shelley had a second half-sister - Claire Clairmont. Possibly jealous of Mary's success in hooking a poet, she decided to find her one of her own and wrote an extraordinary letter to Lord Byron, a complete stranger, throwing herself at him. The result was a brief a

Wow! Daisy Hay arrives in the most spectacular fashion with this wonderful tour of many of our most famous poets and the wreckage of their loves and passions. I am embarrassed to admit that I knew so little of this world. And yet it echoes with some of the most self-indulgent folly of our own happily distant "greatest generation," the Sixties. Hay is so obviously a star-in-the-making. I can't wait for her next book. MORE, PLEASE.