Daisy Hay

Young Romantics. The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives is a kind of group biography, describing the lives and involvement of the foremost Romantic poets and writers of the early 19th century. The beginning of the book is a bit heavy-handed and the entire framework of the book is based upon the biography of James Henry Leigh Hunt better known as Leigh Hunt.

Leigh Hunt is now largely forgotten. Of all the writers involved in the Romantic period described in this book he was the most long-lived, born in 1784 and died in August 1859. Although he was a poet, writer and essayist in his own right, as much work went into his publishing business. He was the central figure in the ‘Hunt Circle’ which included great writers such as Charles Lamb, Shelley, William Hazlitt, Benjamin Haydon, Keats and many others.

The book follows a group of writers and their friends as they settle in Italy, and most attention is given to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and Claire Claremont. There are also very interesting appearances of other poets and writers of the period, of course, John Keats, but also for example, Thomas Love Peacock.

A very interesting book to introduce the Romantic writers.… (more)

This well-crafted and readable narrative is the biography of a relationship, grounded in the history and culture of 19th century Britain. With sympathy for the main actors -- Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli -- but without sentiment, the book looks at their mutually beneficial, yet self-serving, arrangement: He got her financial support, she got dignity and stature of his public achievement, and the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, with the two developing a perhaps unexpectedly deep regard for each other. The author deftly interweaves anecdotes of other women's lives, illustrating their financially provisional existence. The author also exposes Disraeli's multiple motivations: His early desperate efforts to win public office were motivated in part by the insulation from arrest (for debt) enjoyed by MPs.… (more)

Probably more about Leigh Hunt, "who stands at the centre of the circle of talented men and women this book explores," (as Hay--and Hunt--would have it) than most people could possibly want to know. True to the author's stated intention to counter the Romantic "myth" of the isolated artist, this is a group biography of the fluctuating social circles of the Romantics--Byron's Villa Diodati, Hunt's Hampstead, Shelley's Albion House, the Pisan Circle, etc., with a full cast of famous--and less so--characters and equal attention given to the women usually on the periphery. Not an essential read by any means. Sympathetic to the Hunts and Shelleys and unsympathetic to Byron, here a rather one-dimensional, imperious, "touchy and difficult" peer.… (more)

A quick read, essentially an essay in five parts bulked out with full page illustrations, but none the worse for that. Little, I think, that I haven't read before, other than the chapter on Shelley's manuscripts of Frankenstein, which was interesting if (as I've indicted) brief.

I'm struck, as I have been when previously reading of Shelley's life, by the multiple tragedies she endured, from the coldness of, and what must have felt like the rejection by, her father, through multiple bereavement due to disease, suicide and accident, then her own relatively early death from a brain tumour. If her life was a Romantic one (with a capital 'r'), it was also frequently a melancholy and tragic one.… (more)