Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 1816-1822

by James Bieri

ISBN: 0-87413-893-0          Published in 2005          $69.50          AUP Order Form

This volume of Shelley's biography recounts his final years of greatest creativity and his often-painful emotional and romantic entanglements. Leaving Lord Byron in Switzerland, Shelley returned to England with Mary Godwin, their son, and Mary's ever-present stepsister, Claire Clairmont, pregnant with Byron's daughter. After his wife Harriet's shocking suicide, Shelley married Mary, who completed Frankenstein as he reluctantly revised his blasphemous epic of revolution and incest, Laon and Cythna. Legally deprived of his two children from his first marriage, Shelley felt ostracized for his radical political, social, and religious beliefs. Financial pressures, attacks by critics, and health concerns prompted Shelley's 1818 move to Italy. Shelley's love lyrics to Jane, his last inamorata, were written as he composed his final great work, The Triumph of Life, broken off by his untimely drowning, a controversial sailing tragedy that is considered here in detail. Shelley's fascinating posthumous life is narrated in the subsequent intermingled lives of the poet's most intimate associates. Youth's Unextinguished Fire, the first volume of the biography, describes Shelley's early years from 1792-1816. Now retired, Dr. Bieri taught at the University of Texas at Austin.