Young Romantics

"[Hays] interweaves a group biography of the later Romantics—Byron, Keats, Leigh Hunt, the Shelleys—with an extended argument that they not only influenced one another but were preoccupied by (if ambivalent about) the very idea of sociability. This argument she makes persuasively enough . . . But it's as a biographer pure and simple that Hay shines . . . She is a skilled and sure-footed chronicler. In firm, clear, often elegant prose, she narrates the main events in the lives of her subjects from 1813, when they began to coalesce around Hunt in London, till 1822, when Shelley drowned near Livorno, Italy. She also more briefly considers the aftermath of that tragedy; Byron's death in Greece in 1824; the later lives of the remaining figures; and, finally, the struggle over the legacies of Shelley and Byron waged by Hunt and other memoirists. 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 . . . of the later Romantics, this might very well be the one. [She] approaches all her characters, men and women alike, with just the right blend of detachment and sympathy. Yet by concentrating so steadily on their relationships, she inevitably draws attention to the imbalances and (as Clairmont insisted) cruelties within them. Her book winds up being as much a study of domestic arrogance as an exploration of friendship . . . However tormented, this episode remains one of the most riveting in literary history, an operatic tale brimming with color and variety and passion. To hear it told so nimbly and concisely is to be helplessly swept up into it all once again."—Ben Downing, The New York Times

"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

"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 . . . [Hay] 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 . . . 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."—Kirkus Reviews

"Long before the lost generation or '60s rock poets, there was a 19th-century movable feast of interlinked English poets and thinkers that was even more fascinating and combustible. Cambridge Ph.D. Hay, in her first book, delves with scholarly relish into the unorthodox lifestyles and fluid (including quasi-incestuous and incestuous) households of several key figures: vegetarians Percy and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Mary Shelley's stepsister Jane, aka Claire Clairmont; Lord Byron; John Keats; and the little-read today but central revolutionary, Leigh Hunt. The key years are 1813 to 1822, effectively terminating with Shelley's drowning at sea not long after Keats's death from tuberculosis. New here is Claire's autobiographical fragment—archived in the New York Public Library—in which she rakes the libertarians Shelley and Byron, whose daughter she bore, over her emotional coals. Well handled is the so-called summer of Frankenstein, and how, over the nine years Hay chronicles, the boundaries of monogamy were pushed to the breaking point."—Publishers Weekly

"The lives of the second generation of English Romantic writers—Leigh Hunt, Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats—are the stuff of melodramatic romance and legend: antiestablishment rebels; successions of wives, mistresses, and lovers; the struggle for recognition; exile; and early death. Following a broadly chronological movement, this debut by Hay shifts back and forth among the circles of friends and families of these writers, from the imprisonment of Hunt to the death of Shelley and its aftermath. While Hay breaks no new ground, Young Romantics is a vigorously written, well-informed, and popularizing page-turner . . . [A]ccessible . . . and highly recommended for the general reader interested in the lives behind the poems."—T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, Library Journal