Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Biography: Youth's Unextinguished Fire, 1792-1816

by James Bieri

ISBN: 0-87413-870-1          Published in 2004          $69.50          AUP Order Form

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Biography: Youth's Unextinguished Fire, 1792-1816 is the first volume of James Bieri's two-volume biography of Shelley, England's most radical and controversial Romantic poet. Integrating the author's extensive research and recent Shelley scholarship, the biography stresses the intimate relationship between the poet's writing and his complex personality. Youth's Unextinguished Fire explores Shelley's rejection of his aristocratic family's conformist values, his alienation from his parents after dismissal from Oxford for publishing atheistic views, and his quickly formed disastrous first marriage. His political activism in Ireland, his elopement with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (after his first wife's suicide), and the loss of legal custody of his children are also discussed. This volume ends after Shelley's important Swiss summer of 1816 with Byron. A second volume, Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, covers Shelley's Italian years, the circumstances of his death in 1822, and the subsequent lives of his intimates. Illustrated. Now retired, Dr. Bieri taught at the University of Texas at Austin.