Romantic Affinities: Portraits from an Age, 1780-1830

by Rupert Christiansen

The winner of a 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, Romantic Affinities is a kaleidoscopic series of portraits from an era of tumultuous change in Europe as it was experienced and communicated by the writers of the age. These include not only the more familiar Romantic figures, such as Coleridge and Shelley, Byron and Goethe, but also Chenier, H-lderlin, Hoffman, Madame de Sta-l, Pushkin, and many others. Set against the background of the initial liberal dawning the French Revolution seemed to herald, the disillusion that set in after its descent into terror, and the decades of warfare that followed, Christiansen draws on a wealth of scholarship ranging over many related aspects of music, architecture, and politics as he presents fresh perspectives on poetry and prose long defined narrowly as Romanticism.

Genres: History, Romanticism

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1988

About the author

Rupert Christiansen is an English writer, journalist and critic, grandson of Arthur Christiansen (editor of the Daily Express) and son of Kay and Michael Christiansen (editor of the Sunday and Daily Mirror). Born in London, he was educated at Millfield and King's College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in English. As a Fulbright scholar, he also attended Columbia University from 1977 to 1978.

Reviews

[booksummoner · Rating 4 out of 5]

actual rate: 4,5
adored it!

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An accessibly academic introduction to the Romantics.

Written in the late 1980s, how far does 'Romantic Affinities' anticipate the importance of women writers in the movement? Daisy Hay claimed on 'In Our Time' (2000) that few had done justice to the female Romantic poets alongside the 'Great Men': Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth et al. Hay herself has since published in this area, but it is notable that Christiansen devotes space not only to Mary Shelley, but Olympes de Gorges, Madame de Staël, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft and lesser-known lights. Hay could certainly point to the limited scope of discussion, given that Christiansen mainly sweeps these women into a single tidy chapter. However, he does credit them en masse for their energy

Why patronising? Beyond the single chapter itself, Christiansen can verge on the dismissive with his critiques. He considers Frankenstein an adolescent flash in the pan compared to what followed ('churned out... Her fiction is not compelling': p.129); Wollstonecraft he calls 'lumpish and chaotic' (p. 105: against another wonderful female biographer, Claire Tomalin). Lady Caroline Lamb's novel elsewhere gets called 'rubbishy' (p. 216). That said, Frankenstein is also credited to Mary's invention in the face of others who have claimed it leaned to heavily on her husband's knowledge. Even here readers may get the sense of a backhanded compliment, given that Christiansen enumerates Percy Bysshe's scientific and gothic interests but he is clear that she was Frankenstein's independent creator (p. 129).

Overall, Christiansen perhaps slights and overlooks the extent of women's contributions to Romanticism, but then he also takes an unfavourable view of much of Byron's opportunistic output, Coleridge's drug-addled meanderings, and Wordsworth's saccharin sentimentalism. More recent work will probably have dealt with these lacunae. Like Christiansen (1989), Hay (2018) went on to win the Somerset Maugham Award. Her biography of Disraeli - like Tomalin's Whitbread Prize-winning life on Pepys - stand testimony to the quality of feminist interpretations in the field of popular biography.

'Romantic Affinities' is highly readable, impressively detailed, and perhaps should not be anachronistically judged by more recent yardsticks. I suspect there may now be better places to start on the range of Romantic fiction. However, I can still recommend 'Romantic Affinities'. Christiansen doesn't sit on the fence, but rather gives an anecdote-packed and boldly-themed hillside wander through he reactionary politics and timeless art of the 1780-1820s.

[Madly Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book, which is a sort of essay on who and what the Romantic Age was about. Written by a teacher who wanted his students to understand the "big picture" as to how the Romantic Age began in Literature and what it meant.

[Bradford · Rating 4 out of 5]

This engrossing narrative history of European Romanticism focuses on the interconnected life stories and diverging trajectories of poets, dramatists, novelists, and musicians in the wake of the French Revolution (with particular attention to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron).