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Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspective―celebrating their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism. The book focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of fascinating lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley's stepsister and Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt's botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon and Joseph Severn; and writers such as Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas Love Peacock, and William Hazlitt. They were characterized by talent, idealism, and youthful ardor, and these qualities shaped and informed their politically oppositional stances. "In firm, clear, often elegant prose, [Daisy Hay] narrates the main events in the lives of her subjects from 1813, when they began to coalesce around Hunt in London, till 1822" (Ben Downing, The New York Times Book Review).
Young Romantics is an enthralling tale of love, betrayal, sacrifice, and friendship played out against a backdrop of political turbulence and intense literary creativity. "Hay's account of the passionate and messy lives of her Romantics is vivid, picturesque, and finely told" (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).
- Sales Rank: #203222 in Books
- Published on: 2011-03-29
- Released on: 2011-03-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .82" w x 5.50" l, .85 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
From Publishers Weekly
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. Although Hay is passionate about her subject, her writing is unexceptional and monotone: she sticks to the descriptive rather than the analytic. 16 pages of b&w illus. (May 4)
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Review
“[Hay] is a skilled and surefooted chronicler. In firm, clear, often elegant prose, she narrates the main events in the lives of her subjects from 1813, when they began to coaslesce around Hunt in London, till 1822, when Shelley drowned near Livorno, Italy.” ―Ben Downing, The New York Times Book Review
“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
“Young Romantics is an enthralling tale of love, betrayal, sacrifice, and friendship played out against a backdrop of political turbulence and intense literary creativity. And "Hay's account of the passionate and messy lives of her Romantics is vivid, picturesque, and finely told.” ―Richard Eder, The Boston Globe
About the Author
Daisy Hay recently completed a doctorate in English literature at Cambridge. She lives in London. Young Romantics is her first book.
Most helpful customer reviews
35 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
Engaging group biography of famous poets
By Alan A. Elsner
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 affair and a daughter, Allegra. Bryon soon tired of Claire and refused to see him. However, under the law of the day which gave no rights to mothers, or to women in general, he exercised his right to rip Allegra away from her loving mother. He soon found he didn't want the infant around either, though he refused to allow Claire any access to her, and shoved her out of sight into a convent where she died at the age of five of typhoid or malaria.
Claire continued to hang around with the Shelleys. She may have had an affair with the poet and there is the suggestion she bore him a child - which soon died. Mary Shelley herself went from one pregnancy to the next. Four of her five children died young. With all this tragedy, how did she have the time and strength to write "Frankinstein?"
Daisy Hay has a little scoop in this book which she saves for the final pages - a previously unknown autobiographical fragment written by Claire in which she describes both Shelley and Byron as "monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and tragedy." After reading this book, one feels that verdict is about right.
This book concerns a time when poetry really mattered, when new poems excited heated public debate and poets were public figures of the first order. When Byron published the first two cantos of "Childe Harold," he woke up to find himself famous. His poem, "The Corsair" sold 10,000 copies on the first day of publication. But today, who outside of English lit majors reads this stuff? The author could have done much more to explain the greatness of the poetry and why it still matters today -- if indeed it does.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
A long book, every page a pleasure to read
By Robert S. Hanenberg
This is the story of Shelley, Keats and Byron, their relatives and friends. It starts with the great Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), notorious for writing an essay claiming that men and women are equal. Her first daughter, Fanny, could not find a respectable place in life and committed suicide. Wollstonecraft later married the philosopher Godwin, but died in childbirth giving birth to a second daughter, Mary, who at age 16 ran off to Europe with the poet Shelley, who was already married to Harriet, who later committed suicide. Godwin remarried and had another daughter, Claire. She became part of the Percy Shelley/Mary Godwin ménage, formed a romantic attachment with her brother-in-law, Shelley, possibly sexual, but unable to replace her half-sister in Shelley's affections, threw herself at the poet Byron, who was very rich and abnormally handsome. Byron accepted the offer of sex from the 18 year old Claire ("What would you do?"), and agreed to raise the resulting daughter, but then left his daughter to die of typhus in a Rome orphanage. He grew to detest Claire, who suffered greatly for her affair with Byron, and later in life vehemently renounced the "free love" which Wollstonecraft and Godwin had stood for.
There is more--the story of the journalist Leigh Hunt and the two years he spent in prison (he could not go out, but he could live in an apartment with his family, plenty of books and a piano), the story of Keats, who died young of tuberculosis in Rome, the story of Shelley's drowning off the coast of Italy and how it affected the other characters--but you can read it yourself. It is a long book, and every page is entertaining.
Aside from the stories of these people, the author wants to make the point that the "Romantic" poets were not at all isolated geniuses, as they were later portrayed. They formed cliques and coteries, entertained, loved and hated each other, walked in the woods together, played sports together, discussed poetry and philosophy together, and challenged each other to experiment with various modes of writing. These interactions gave rise to their great works.
The author of this book, being a woman, has insights a man might miss ("Shelley was out all day .... with the ever-faithful Claire at his side, and [pregnant] Mary had little to do except sit at home reading, and feel fat and unwanted."), and a refined sense of social relations.
You also learn a lot about how life was for people in the early 1800s. Women often died in childbirth, so there were a lot of half-brothers and sisters around, and in some cases, like with Byron and his half-sister, they fell in love and had sex. Also, many children died in childbirth. Women were always worn down by pregnancy, and always losing children. It never seems to have occurred to their husbands to withdraw before ejaculation, or to have non-penetrative sex.
But women could be obtuse as well. Both Mary and her sister Claire fell in love and had children by married men, despite the dangers, both physical and social. A woman who could not form a respectable marriage was condemned to become a hanger-on in a relative's household. That led to other complications, because the only available men were their sisters' husbands. Or, if they could not find a place in a relative's household they could try to become a governess in a stranger's household. Of course the only men available there would be their employers. No wonder so many women committed suicide. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
All the while, everyone devoted much of their lives to writing letters and diaries, which is why we know so much about them. I suspect scholars will quibble with some of the interpretations of the evidence, but I for one am very happy this book was written, for many reasons, not least that it got me reading Shelley, Keats and Byron again.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Daisy Hay's Young Romantics
By Maureen M. Agnew
This multiple person biography is an extensively researched and, hence, scholarly narration focusing on the relationships among Leigh Hunt, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and, to a lesser degree, John Keats. Her premise is that it was the relationships among these writers that helped to produce their individual works as opposed to what would have occurred if each had been writing without interacting with the others. This idea is workable for some literature such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein but not always for other works. Therefore, I think Hay tries to force the premise at times. However the book is well written, and she brings to life all the major participants in and interesting and cohesive way.
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