Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives by Daisy Hay

I have had very limited experience reading biographies, because my attempts were all disappointing, but this book has restored my faith in the genre. This is a completely wonderful book; intelligent, perceptive, insightful, touching, and so much fun to read. Daisy Hay is a professor who studies the Romantics, so she is exceptionally well-informed on everything to do with them, and she somehow finds the perfect tone, not getting into any complicated theory, but deep and powerfully argued. The task of this book is to present the second generation of Romantic poets not as the isolated, tortured geniuses they are popularly seen as, but as part of a shifting and fertile community. The lives of their female companions, not only Mary Shelley but also her step sister Claire Clairmont and Bess Kent (the sister of Leigh Hunt's wife) play a central part in this story. An great part of this book is that Hay doesn't pass judgement (or not much). The lives and writings of these people are exceptionally polarising, some of the actions they took are shocking and their writing has sent critics into ecstatic hysterics for around 200 years, yet Hay presents the facts from several perspectives, and presents various critical opinions without shoving any one interpretation down her readers' throats. Byron, of course, is the main polarising element, many biographies are focussed on vilifying him, while other writers have become full-time Byron apologists. Hay clearly doesn't fancy Byron as much as she does Shelley, but she still refrains from presenting him in a uniformly negative light. While there are many wonderful things about this biography, the one that I liked best was the fact that Hay somehow makes these people exceptionally alive, they seem so very real. Descriptions of their travels, their domestic lives, their adventures, their pastimes, their games are so fascinating and charming. She gives illuminating quotes and descriptions which capture the essence of the characters, yet the text is never dominated by quotations and repetitions of others' work. I don't think I ever really realised how young they all were before, it's one thing to just read the facts of what happened when, but Hay's writing made me see these people as exceptionally young, impulsive, erratic, and dealing with things far beyond their years (one of the most tragic parts of the story was Mary's loss of so many children who she really loved, in miscarriages and from illness). One of my favourite people in this book, whom I knew nothing about before, was Edward Trelawney, an absolutely ridiculous acolyte of Byron who made up an outrageous biography for himself and proceeded to party with Shelley and Byron and fall in love with Claire. He survived all the other characters, and eventually had his ashes buried (by his mistress) next to Shelley's. I would read an entire biography of only him (provided Daisy Hay wrote it). After reading this, I feel like I acquired the same amount of knowledge I would have from a course in the Romantics and enjoyed it as much and in the same way as a good novel.