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Shelley: The Pursuit
Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure." Expelled from college, disowned by his aristocratic father, driven from England, Shelley led a life marked from its beginning to its early end by a violent rejection of society; he embraced rebellion and disgrace without thought of the cost to himself or to others. Here we have the real Shelley—radical agitator, atheist, apostle of free love, but above all a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator, whose life and work have proved an essential inspiration to poets as varied as W.B. Yeats and Allen Ginsberg.
830 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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About the author
Richard Holmes
31 books240 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
See this thread for more information.
Biographer Richard Holmes was born in London, England on 5 November 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. His first book, Shelley:The Pursuit, was published in 1974 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. The first volume of his biography of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions, was published in 1989 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year award. Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993), an account of Johnson's undocumented friendship with the notorious poet Richard Savage, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) in 1993. The second volume of his study of Coleridge, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, was published in 1998. It won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Heinemann Award and was shortlisted for the first Samuel Johnson Prize awarded in 1999.
Richard Holmes writes and reviews regularly for various journals and newspapers, including the New York Review of Books. His most recent book, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000), continues the exploration of his own highly original biographical method that he first wrote about in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985). He is also editor of a new series of editions of classic English biographies that includes work by Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe and William Godwin.
His latest book, The Age of Wonder (2008), is an examination of the life and work of the scientists of the Romantic age who laid the foundations of modern science. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an OBE in 1992. He was awarded an honorary Litt.D. in 2000 by the University of East Anglia, where he was appointed Professor of Biographical Studies in September 2001.
See this thread for more information.
Biographer Richard Holmes was born in London, England on 5 November 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. His first book, Shelley:The Pursuit, was published in 1974 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. The first volume of his biography of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions, was published in 1989 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year award. Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993), an account of Johnson's undocumented friendship with the notorious poet Richard Savage, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) in 1993. The second volume of his study of Coleridge, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, was published in 1998. It won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Heinemann Award and was shortlisted for the first Samuel Johnson Prize awarded in 1999.
Richard Holmes writes and reviews regularly for various journals and newspapers, including the New York Review of Books. His most recent book, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000), continues the exploration of his own highly original biographical method that he first wrote about in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985). He is also editor of a new series of editions of classic English biographies that includes work by Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe and William Godwin.
His latest book, The Age of Wonder (2008), is an examination of the life and work of the scientists of the Romantic age who laid the foundations of modern science. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an OBE in 1992. He was awarded an honorary Litt.D. in 2000 by the University of East Anglia, where he was appointed Professor of Biographical Studies in September 2001.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
February 17, 2017
As far as I’m concerned, this is the only decent biography of Shelley. Richard Holmes writes with stunning detail and clarity. The amount of research that has gone into this vast book is incredible. I learnt so much about him here.
All reading comes from a personal angle, and, for me, Holmes underplays one drastic element of Shelley’s life: his diet. Shelley’s vegetarianism truly influenced much of his beliefs, his politics, his protests and his poetry. It is such a large part of who he was. Whilst Holmes isn’t openly critical towards it, he underplays its role in his psyche and considers it slightly kooky. And that’s the only reason I’m not giving this book five stars! Holmes ignored it almost (shakes fist in anger.)
Vegetariansim was so much of who Shelley was.
p.s- Sorry about all the Shelley reviews lately! I’m writing on him for my dissertation, and reviewing these books here is the only way I can stay active!
All reading comes from a personal angle, and, for me, Holmes underplays one drastic element of Shelley’s life: his diet. Shelley’s vegetarianism truly influenced much of his beliefs, his politics, his protests and his poetry. It is such a large part of who he was. Whilst Holmes isn’t openly critical towards it, he underplays its role in his psyche and considers it slightly kooky. And that’s the only reason I’m not giving this book five stars! Holmes ignored it almost (shakes fist in anger.)
Vegetariansim was so much of who Shelley was.
p.s- Sorry about all the Shelley reviews lately! I’m writing on him for my dissertation, and reviewing these books here is the only way I can stay active!
August 31, 2011
I'll be writing something on this the next few days. It's no small task. Easily the best biography I've ever read. Sorry Ellmann and Boyd, Joyce and Nabokov are towering subjects, but this takes the prize.
December 4, 2015
If I am being honest, I will admit that at times I found this book to be a little dry. But if there was ever a class of presenting a difficult subject warts and all, and yet transmitting the love that the writer has for the subject - this book is it.
Holmes' book was the book that re-launched Shelley or whatever you want to say instead of that.
Honestly, I think Holmes deserves a prize for untangling the whole Mary/Shelley/Claire mess and being fair to all the parties.
You like the Romantics, read this.
Holmes' book was the book that re-launched Shelley or whatever you want to say instead of that.
Honestly, I think Holmes deserves a prize for untangling the whole Mary/Shelley/Claire mess and being fair to all the parties.
You like the Romantics, read this.
May 31, 2022
”There will always be Shelley lovers, but this book is not for them.”
Reputation – 4/5
There is a generally agreed upon triumvirate of great literary biographies that includes Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov, and this, Richard Holmes’ Shelley: The Pursuit.
Holmes achieved this feat of esoteric biographical immortality at the age of 29, the same age that Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia.
Point – 5/5
“This is a young man’s book,” Holmes remarks in the preface, and like the eternally young man it chronicles, this book matches its subject’s fervor, impatience, and hunt for life. The Pursuit is the perfect subtitle for a book about a man who never settled in his literary or private life, whose intellectual and passionate investigations were never satisfied, and who died craving more adventure, more life, and if not life, then the knowledge of what death might be like.
Two foundational elements of Shelley’s early family life offer a key to understanding him:
1) He was the son of an irascibly stubborn and conventional father
2) He was the oldest son with a tribe of little sisters who idolized him.
The first explains his pathological incapacity for capitulation in the face of authority. Shelley was a lifelong infidel, exponent of free love, and hater of all tyranny in even its most mundane and unavoidable forms. Probably the defining event of Shelley’s early life was his expulsion from Oxford at the age of 18 for his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. The expulsion resulted not only in the social ostracization from the English elite but also the unforgiving hostility of his conservative father. By the age of 19, Shelley had lost all prospect of a respectable life in England and all possibility of reconciliation with his father unless he would recant his views on religion. He did not. He would never recant anything.
Robert Browning, the biggest Shelley fan of all the English poets, wrote that Shelley likely would have mellowed as he aged and, perhaps, found refuge in the Church of England if he had lived long enough. This is impossible. The emotional and social excommunication that Shelley suffered while still in his youth mixed with his natural obstinacy virtually ensures that he never would have, never could have sought atonement with authority.
The second fact explains Shelley’s ever-present parade of female admirers. Never throughout all Shelley’s wanderings did he have fewer than two women who he was providing for, who utterly adored him, and with whom, more often than not, he was having a sexual relationship. Shelley was married twice. His first wife was something of a starter marriage. He had two children by her, but, upon a budding friendship/apprenticeship with William Godwin, Shelley left his first wife to run away with Godwin’s daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. That is, the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
Holmes’ describes the abduction (which included Mary’s step-sister, Jane, as a packaged deal):
“Shelley ordered a chaise for 4 a.m. and stood waiting at the corner of Skinner Street ‘until the lightening and the stars became pale’. The air was still and oppressive, and the city seemed to slumber uneasily. At long last Mary and Jane appeared at a side-door clutching small bundles, their faces drawn and pale from lack of sleep. They mounted up and clattered away over the cobbles. At Dart-ford, they hired four horses to outstrip pursuit, but Mary became ill with the stormy summer heat and the speed, so that they had to halt at each stage for her to recover, while Shelley like a character out of one of his own romances, was ‘divided between anxiety for her health and terror lest our pursuers should arrive’. Jane gazed listlessly from the carriage window, silent and close to tears. At 4 p.m. they had reached Dover, and by six they hired a small open channel boat, and were drawing out from the white cliffs while the sun set and the sails flapped in the flagging breeze. Jane looked at the English cliffs and thought ‘I shall never see these more. As the moon came up, a heavy swell set in, and the sailors debated whether to make for Calais or Boulogne. The wind moved to the opposing quarter, and blew stiffly all night, while the summer sheet lightning shook out constantly from an ominous horizon. Mary sat exhausted between Shelley’s knees, and slept fitfully. At dawn, the wind veered and waves broke violently into the undecked boat, and the three of them huddled together under travelling cloaks, too tired to feel more than discomfort and disappointment at the prospect of being drowned. Mary did not speak or look, but Shelley was content merely to feel her presence. Then suddenly the wind was blowing them fast into Calais, and the boat drove upon the sands, and they were safe. Shelley looked down and found Mary was asleep. He woke her gently and said: ‘Look, Mary, the sun rises over France.’ Together they disembarked and the three of them walked wearily and happily over the sands to the inn.
By the evening their pursuers in the shape of Mrs Godwin had arrived. Shelley refused to allow her to see Mary, but Jane spent the night with her mother, and was almost persuaded to return by the ‘pathos of Mrs Godwin’s appeal’. But the next morning, Saturday the 30th, after Shelley had talked to Jane and advised her to reconsider for half an hour, she told her mother she would continue with Shelley and Mary. Mrs Godwin, speechless with fury, returned to England on the next boat: it was complete victory for Shelley”
This is the most illustrative passage of Holmes’ writing in this book. It is breathless and brilliant. It balances perfectly the biographer’s detachment with that often overdone “eyewitness” style that reminds one of crappy historical novels. Holmes never descends to that sort of cheapness, and only exceedingly rarely bogs himself down in detail of background information. Shelley was, unsurprisingly, in perpetual financial trouble, but Holmes mostly corrals these boring numbers into the footnotes and the ends of chapters.
The miracle of this biography is its pace. In 800+ pages it is never slow, never stalled by trivialities, never prejudiced. When Holmes makes a subjective judgment, he does not lose his stride or assume an academic tone. Shelley lived a lightning life and Holmes keeps pace with it. We live in a golden age of biographies, but the encyclopedic cargo of modern detail sinks the lives of many subjects. This is particularly dangerous when the subject is a man of action or extreme dynamism. Shelley was such a man. He moved constantly all over Britain then Switzerland then Italy. He taught himself Greek, Italian, German, Spanish. By the end of his life he had translated Homer, Plato, Dante, Goethe, and Calderón de la Barca. Despite his almost complete lack of popular salability, he wrote poetry incessantly, and by the end of his life he was undeniably at the height of his powers. His poetry had attained a rarefied sharpness and philosophical intensity unmatched by any other English poet of his time. “I always go on until I am stopped,” Shelley once wrote, “and I am never stopped.”
His life stopped only a month before his 30th birthday, sunk in a boat wreck in the Gulf of Spezia. This is where Holmes’ biography also ends. It does not add some abstract final appraisal of Shelley as a poet or a man. It ends with the reverberation of the tone of art, of life, of the measured motion of the sea.
Recommendation – 4/5
There will never be a better biography of Shelley. There may be finer expositions of his writings, of his character and relationships; new documents may come to light that illumine some of the more obscure parts of his life, but Holmes’ book is not merely a biography, it is itself a work of art. It is a model of the biography of an animated life. Its style would not work for a reclusive scholar or any man who lived to age 80, but for a Romantic poet, who was himself like a character of his own works, whose life ousted like a brief candle, it is perfect.
I would recommend this book to anyone who loves good biography, and especially to anyone with even a remote fascination for the English Romantic movement. All the great actors appear, and Shelley’s relationship with Byron is especially well-drawn.
Personal – 5/5
This is the best biography I’ve ever read. As a compendium of facts and authoritative judgments, it does not take first place, but it is unmatched in its blend of art and life - a blend that Shelley first perfected in himself. Holmes perceived the essential in Shelley’s life – the force, the sensitivity, the pursuit - and harmonized his own writing with it. The result is electric.
For me, this book was a summation of several of my chief enthusiasms: biography, English romanticism, political philosophy, and Shelley. I love Shelley unashamedly. And in my estimation, he has never been properly appraised as a poet or as a thinker. This book, though it may not be for Shelley lovers (much of his life is unavoidably problematic by 21st century standards), it is the definitive portrait of man who, more than any other great person of his time, embodied the values that have come to be accepted in our progressive world. He was a feminist, a vegetarian, a proponent of free love and nonviolence, and an atheist when all of that was not hip or cool, but socially damning and illegal. His radical politics inspired Friedrich Engels, Leo Tolstoy, and Mahatma Gandhi. And let us not forget that he was a poet of true genius – an unmatched lyric poet and arguably the greatest philosophical poet English has ever produced. His early death is, in my opinion, the severest loss that English literature ever suffered. Who knows what he could have done had he lived even another five years?
It is useless to imagine. What we have here is one of the most remarkable, sincere, and luminous men who ever wrote a poem in English and a faultless biography to match him.
Reputation – 4/5
There is a generally agreed upon triumvirate of great literary biographies that includes Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov, and this, Richard Holmes’ Shelley: The Pursuit.
Holmes achieved this feat of esoteric biographical immortality at the age of 29, the same age that Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia.
Point – 5/5
“This is a young man’s book,” Holmes remarks in the preface, and like the eternally young man it chronicles, this book matches its subject’s fervor, impatience, and hunt for life. The Pursuit is the perfect subtitle for a book about a man who never settled in his literary or private life, whose intellectual and passionate investigations were never satisfied, and who died craving more adventure, more life, and if not life, then the knowledge of what death might be like.
Two foundational elements of Shelley’s early family life offer a key to understanding him:
1) He was the son of an irascibly stubborn and conventional father
2) He was the oldest son with a tribe of little sisters who idolized him.
The first explains his pathological incapacity for capitulation in the face of authority. Shelley was a lifelong infidel, exponent of free love, and hater of all tyranny in even its most mundane and unavoidable forms. Probably the defining event of Shelley’s early life was his expulsion from Oxford at the age of 18 for his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. The expulsion resulted not only in the social ostracization from the English elite but also the unforgiving hostility of his conservative father. By the age of 19, Shelley had lost all prospect of a respectable life in England and all possibility of reconciliation with his father unless he would recant his views on religion. He did not. He would never recant anything.
Robert Browning, the biggest Shelley fan of all the English poets, wrote that Shelley likely would have mellowed as he aged and, perhaps, found refuge in the Church of England if he had lived long enough. This is impossible. The emotional and social excommunication that Shelley suffered while still in his youth mixed with his natural obstinacy virtually ensures that he never would have, never could have sought atonement with authority.
The second fact explains Shelley’s ever-present parade of female admirers. Never throughout all Shelley’s wanderings did he have fewer than two women who he was providing for, who utterly adored him, and with whom, more often than not, he was having a sexual relationship. Shelley was married twice. His first wife was something of a starter marriage. He had two children by her, but, upon a budding friendship/apprenticeship with William Godwin, Shelley left his first wife to run away with Godwin’s daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. That is, the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
Holmes’ describes the abduction (which included Mary’s step-sister, Jane, as a packaged deal):
“Shelley ordered a chaise for 4 a.m. and stood waiting at the corner of Skinner Street ‘until the lightening and the stars became pale’. The air was still and oppressive, and the city seemed to slumber uneasily. At long last Mary and Jane appeared at a side-door clutching small bundles, their faces drawn and pale from lack of sleep. They mounted up and clattered away over the cobbles. At Dart-ford, they hired four horses to outstrip pursuit, but Mary became ill with the stormy summer heat and the speed, so that they had to halt at each stage for her to recover, while Shelley like a character out of one of his own romances, was ‘divided between anxiety for her health and terror lest our pursuers should arrive’. Jane gazed listlessly from the carriage window, silent and close to tears. At 4 p.m. they had reached Dover, and by six they hired a small open channel boat, and were drawing out from the white cliffs while the sun set and the sails flapped in the flagging breeze. Jane looked at the English cliffs and thought ‘I shall never see these more. As the moon came up, a heavy swell set in, and the sailors debated whether to make for Calais or Boulogne. The wind moved to the opposing quarter, and blew stiffly all night, while the summer sheet lightning shook out constantly from an ominous horizon. Mary sat exhausted between Shelley’s knees, and slept fitfully. At dawn, the wind veered and waves broke violently into the undecked boat, and the three of them huddled together under travelling cloaks, too tired to feel more than discomfort and disappointment at the prospect of being drowned. Mary did not speak or look, but Shelley was content merely to feel her presence. Then suddenly the wind was blowing them fast into Calais, and the boat drove upon the sands, and they were safe. Shelley looked down and found Mary was asleep. He woke her gently and said: ‘Look, Mary, the sun rises over France.’ Together they disembarked and the three of them walked wearily and happily over the sands to the inn.
By the evening their pursuers in the shape of Mrs Godwin had arrived. Shelley refused to allow her to see Mary, but Jane spent the night with her mother, and was almost persuaded to return by the ‘pathos of Mrs Godwin’s appeal’. But the next morning, Saturday the 30th, after Shelley had talked to Jane and advised her to reconsider for half an hour, she told her mother she would continue with Shelley and Mary. Mrs Godwin, speechless with fury, returned to England on the next boat: it was complete victory for Shelley”
This is the most illustrative passage of Holmes’ writing in this book. It is breathless and brilliant. It balances perfectly the biographer’s detachment with that often overdone “eyewitness” style that reminds one of crappy historical novels. Holmes never descends to that sort of cheapness, and only exceedingly rarely bogs himself down in detail of background information. Shelley was, unsurprisingly, in perpetual financial trouble, but Holmes mostly corrals these boring numbers into the footnotes and the ends of chapters.
The miracle of this biography is its pace. In 800+ pages it is never slow, never stalled by trivialities, never prejudiced. When Holmes makes a subjective judgment, he does not lose his stride or assume an academic tone. Shelley lived a lightning life and Holmes keeps pace with it. We live in a golden age of biographies, but the encyclopedic cargo of modern detail sinks the lives of many subjects. This is particularly dangerous when the subject is a man of action or extreme dynamism. Shelley was such a man. He moved constantly all over Britain then Switzerland then Italy. He taught himself Greek, Italian, German, Spanish. By the end of his life he had translated Homer, Plato, Dante, Goethe, and Calderón de la Barca. Despite his almost complete lack of popular salability, he wrote poetry incessantly, and by the end of his life he was undeniably at the height of his powers. His poetry had attained a rarefied sharpness and philosophical intensity unmatched by any other English poet of his time. “I always go on until I am stopped,” Shelley once wrote, “and I am never stopped.”
His life stopped only a month before his 30th birthday, sunk in a boat wreck in the Gulf of Spezia. This is where Holmes’ biography also ends. It does not add some abstract final appraisal of Shelley as a poet or a man. It ends with the reverberation of the tone of art, of life, of the measured motion of the sea.
Recommendation – 4/5
There will never be a better biography of Shelley. There may be finer expositions of his writings, of his character and relationships; new documents may come to light that illumine some of the more obscure parts of his life, but Holmes’ book is not merely a biography, it is itself a work of art. It is a model of the biography of an animated life. Its style would not work for a reclusive scholar or any man who lived to age 80, but for a Romantic poet, who was himself like a character of his own works, whose life ousted like a brief candle, it is perfect.
I would recommend this book to anyone who loves good biography, and especially to anyone with even a remote fascination for the English Romantic movement. All the great actors appear, and Shelley’s relationship with Byron is especially well-drawn.
Personal – 5/5
This is the best biography I’ve ever read. As a compendium of facts and authoritative judgments, it does not take first place, but it is unmatched in its blend of art and life - a blend that Shelley first perfected in himself. Holmes perceived the essential in Shelley’s life – the force, the sensitivity, the pursuit - and harmonized his own writing with it. The result is electric.
For me, this book was a summation of several of my chief enthusiasms: biography, English romanticism, political philosophy, and Shelley. I love Shelley unashamedly. And in my estimation, he has never been properly appraised as a poet or as a thinker. This book, though it may not be for Shelley lovers (much of his life is unavoidably problematic by 21st century standards), it is the definitive portrait of man who, more than any other great person of his time, embodied the values that have come to be accepted in our progressive world. He was a feminist, a vegetarian, a proponent of free love and nonviolence, and an atheist when all of that was not hip or cool, but socially damning and illegal. His radical politics inspired Friedrich Engels, Leo Tolstoy, and Mahatma Gandhi. And let us not forget that he was a poet of true genius – an unmatched lyric poet and arguably the greatest philosophical poet English has ever produced. His early death is, in my opinion, the severest loss that English literature ever suffered. Who knows what he could have done had he lived even another five years?
It is useless to imagine. What we have here is one of the most remarkable, sincere, and luminous men who ever wrote a poem in English and a faultless biography to match him.
January 29, 2012
Nearing the end of these 800 pages, I began to think it's a good thing Shelley didn't live past 29. One of the pleasures of this kind of lengthy literary biography is it assumes you know (or are willing to learn, on the fly) a great deal about the history of the time (early 19th century England, in this case), all of the other significant literary, artistic and intellectual figures of the day, masses of detail about the architecture and topography of multiple Italian and Swiss locations (not to mention half a dozen parts of England, Scotland and Wales, since Shelley never stayed in one place for long).
One should also, in theory, enjoy all the close reading and analysis of a huge body of poetry that "one" is not so familiar with - sadly for my poetic sensibilities, I often found myself getting impatient at those parts and wanting to get to the next episode in the poet's unbelievable soap opera of life - perhaps I'll try to return to some of the more literary parts!
One should also, in theory, enjoy all the close reading and analysis of a huge body of poetry that "one" is not so familiar with - sadly for my poetic sensibilities, I often found myself getting impatient at those parts and wanting to get to the next episode in the poet's unbelievable soap opera of life - perhaps I'll try to return to some of the more literary parts!
August 11, 2018
Just have to add, consider the situation of 24-year-old Mary Shelley in the summer of 1822. After four pregnancies, she had one surviving child. She was pregnant once again and feeling ill. Against her wishes, her husband took a summer house at the Bay of Lirici and blithely left all of the house management duties to her while he spent money they didn't have on a sailboat, where he spent all his time. Mary is sitting, feeling unwell and exhausted on the terrace, trying to cope with the blazing heat, while Shelley is off in the boat with their house guest, Jane Williams, to whom he is writing love poetry. But after he drowned, Mary devoted the rest of her life to mourning him and burnishing his memory.
This book is 800 pages of Shelley, his times and his circle. Holmes quotes extensively from the surviving letters and journals of Shelley's family and friends, drawing a portrait of Shelley as his contemporaries viewed him. I especially appreciated the lengthy quotes from Shelley's poetry and the commentary on both his prose and his poems, because it spared me from the trouble of reading it all for myself, as I am more fascinated by Shelley the man, a proto-Marxist and proto-hippie who got himself entangled in endless financial and emotional problems. I liked Holmes' even-handed approach to Shelley; when he is dishonest and selfish, he says so, but he also gives him credit where credit is due. His descriptions of Europe and especially Italy helped conjure up the world that the Shelleys lived in, as well as his explanations of the politics of England at that time, for example, government censorship of the press.
This book is 800 pages of Shelley, his times and his circle. Holmes quotes extensively from the surviving letters and journals of Shelley's family and friends, drawing a portrait of Shelley as his contemporaries viewed him. I especially appreciated the lengthy quotes from Shelley's poetry and the commentary on both his prose and his poems, because it spared me from the trouble of reading it all for myself, as I am more fascinated by Shelley the man, a proto-Marxist and proto-hippie who got himself entangled in endless financial and emotional problems. I liked Holmes' even-handed approach to Shelley; when he is dishonest and selfish, he says so, but he also gives him credit where credit is due. His descriptions of Europe and especially Italy helped conjure up the world that the Shelleys lived in, as well as his explanations of the politics of England at that time, for example, government censorship of the press.
January 31, 2015
This is a long book - I was a bit intimidated by its heft - but it never slowed down. As Shelley and his family moved and moved from one continent to the next, from one city to the next from one house to the next, I never wanted not to follow them. Holmes admires Shelley but doesn't flinch at the bad behavior. Also, he doesn't come to ready conclusions but gives you the facts as he has found them and lets you consider them and have your own thoughts about what they might mean.
I had to keep reminding myself how little time had passed as I moved from chapter to chapter, how awfully young all of the characters were. Shelly was brilliant but frantic and how sad and fitting he did not die in his bed but on a stormy sea.
I came very late to this biography (as to the genre itself). I am glad I did not miss it.
I had to keep reminding myself how little time had passed as I moved from chapter to chapter, how awfully young all of the characters were. Shelly was brilliant but frantic and how sad and fitting he did not die in his bed but on a stormy sea.
I came very late to this biography (as to the genre itself). I am glad I did not miss it.
May 5, 2008
I should re-read this biography, now that I am reading Ann Wroe's new biography of Shelly. My recollection of this book is that it contains a very exciting and fast-paced story of Shelly's life, focusing on the events and circumstances of his life. Among the best of Holmes' uniformly wonderful biographies.
December 7, 2022
Reading and Writing Marginalia, 2022 SUMMER PROJECT.
I missed the summer project deadline. Laughing. Oh, well. This is not my first read. Not my second. I first read this book many years ago and lingered over it for a year. Probably a couple years after it came out, I read it again. I am a fangirl of Shelley and Holmes. Holmes, who is a beautiful writer, has written the definitive biography for me. No films, no discussions that I ever see online get Shelley right and I don't know why when we have so many wonderful biographies of him.
Shelley was a polymath, an outsider, and also a visionary. He was way ahead of his time. He was like all of us, a very imperfect person and a product of a brutal childhood and an uncaring father. I like to remember how much he loved poetry and literature, how much he cherished freedom, even for women, how he was willing to help other people, my god, he was supporting at least four households when he died at the very young age of 29, in a drowning. People who really knew Shelley, who met him really did love him. Even Byron was susceptible to Shelley's influence and Byron was as cruel as he was brilliant.
Shelley informs my work. He was remarkable. And along with Coleridge and Keats, my favorite of the Romantic poets. I studied Dante so I could write a paper on Shelley's final poem, The Triumph of Life. If only he had lived to finish it. Sad........tragic. And tragic for Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Hunt, and Peacock who loved and depended on him. All their lives would have been better if Shelley had lived.
I missed the summer project deadline. Laughing. Oh, well. This is not my first read. Not my second. I first read this book many years ago and lingered over it for a year. Probably a couple years after it came out, I read it again. I am a fangirl of Shelley and Holmes. Holmes, who is a beautiful writer, has written the definitive biography for me. No films, no discussions that I ever see online get Shelley right and I don't know why when we have so many wonderful biographies of him.
Shelley was a polymath, an outsider, and also a visionary. He was way ahead of his time. He was like all of us, a very imperfect person and a product of a brutal childhood and an uncaring father. I like to remember how much he loved poetry and literature, how much he cherished freedom, even for women, how he was willing to help other people, my god, he was supporting at least four households when he died at the very young age of 29, in a drowning. People who really knew Shelley, who met him really did love him. Even Byron was susceptible to Shelley's influence and Byron was as cruel as he was brilliant.
Shelley informs my work. He was remarkable. And along with Coleridge and Keats, my favorite of the Romantic poets. I studied Dante so I could write a paper on Shelley's final poem, The Triumph of Life. If only he had lived to finish it. Sad........tragic. And tragic for Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Hunt, and Peacock who loved and depended on him. All their lives would have been better if Shelley had lived.
October 21, 2016
What a ridiculous, beautiful, genius asshole he was. Holmes tells the tale well, not playing particular favourites with any of the cast of characters (all of which are, in their own ways, flawed to some extent), and his literary analysis of Shelley's work, while necessarily limited, is clear and interesting. One of the best biographies I've read.
December 28, 2016
Finally I finished it.
November 16, 2021
I found this book enchanting, dazzling, phenomenal. Shelley in this portrayal had such a precarious existence almost from the beginning of his earliest ability to think for himself. Despite his materially auspicious start in a family of wealth and an unusually privileged foundation, his rebellious intellect, finding its earliest voice in outspoken atheism, sent him on the path of the perpetual outsider. His spoken and active pursuit of some aspects of "free love" led to several entanglements that did not always end happily. His political instincts tended toward defense of the underdog with a hint of superiority in the mix that was not without a slight tinge of sometimes infuriating hypocrisy. He longed for a community of intellectual and political kindred spirits and his pursuit of this was perhaps more important to him than purely literary production. I was continually struck but the energy required to sustain the manner of life he had fashioned and P.B.S. as a unique artist of human relationships is what will remain with me as I continue to contemplate this outstanding work of analysis, history and the human psychology embodied in this wonderfully weird person and his chosen family, who did not always consent to their choosing. He encapsulated so many inconsistencies, frailties, flamboyance, hypochondria, dietary obsessions... It's impossible to list all that made his short life fascinating to imagine with the help of this terrific book.
September 5, 2021
Richard Holmes Shelley: The Pursuit is a pillar text in Percy Shelley scholarship for many very good reasons. Meticulously researched, well sign-posted, and truly compendious, it's an impressive feat of biography made even more impressive by the fact that it was published before the internet made research and collaboration a simpler feat than in previous centuries.
My personal feelings towards Percy aside (he was an ass, a skirt chaser, weird about kids, and Mary deserved better), The Pursuit was worth the read. Intimate and unflinching, if a little prone to enumerating his genius, Holmes' work sets the standard for what biography can be.
My personal feelings towards Percy aside (he was an ass, a skirt chaser, weird about kids, and Mary deserved better), The Pursuit was worth the read. Intimate and unflinching, if a little prone to enumerating his genius, Holmes' work sets the standard for what biography can be.
September 7, 2022
Early in 1820, Shelley and his household moved from Florence to Pisa. Holmes, the author of this wonderful biography, takes this occasion to observe that this was their eighth move in the last twenty-four months, but also notes that his nearly two-year sojourn there would be the longest he would live in any one place since his childhood at Field House, which he’d left when he was ten years old. The incessant moves throughout Italy only mirrored those he’d undertaken in all the years since his expulsion from Oxford prior to his self-imposed exile to Italy. Holmes asks at this point if Shelley was pursuing something, or if he felt that he was being pursued. It is a central question and shows the fitting nature of the subtitle chosen for this very thorough, even-handed, objective and yet quite sympathetic account of Shelley’s frustrating twenty-nine years of life.
The answer as to the nature of his pursuit is, I believe, both: he was at one and the same time seeking some form of accommodation away from a world and desiring to become both involved in it and work to change it. He felt an almost visceral disgust with the existing political, economic, cultural, religious and governmental structures of authoritarian control and constantly challenged their very values and mores which he found anathema to his touchstones of love and liberty. He was a forthright and rebellious radical. However, he most often sought shelter in isolated cottages or villas which provided shelter from the vicissitudes of contact with the outside world. And then, in a matter of weeks, he’d be on the move again.
This push-me/pull-you tension applies to almost all aspects of Shelley’s life. His personal relations ebbed and flowed: he first adored Godwin from afar, then befriended him, and finally spent years fending off his elder’s financial demands after eloping with his daughter. He had an intense friendship with Hogg until their relation deteriorated while living in the Lake District. The intense devotion he spawned in the schoolteacher Hitchener was matched only by the callousness with which she was later dropped from his family circle. After helping his first wife get away from her family which entailed going against his principles and marrying her, he later lost almost all interest in her. Even his relations with Mary were, after their initial rush of emotional ecstasy, generally nervous, tense, chilling and difficult. He got along well at times with Byron but had to deal with the intimidating effect the much more successful writer had on his own creative output. Other than Mary, his closest emotional attachment was with Claire, her half-sister. The difficulties their relationship posed to the emotional equilibrium of the household were extreme, as was the heartache they both felt after their forced separation.
Relations with his publishers were equally tenuous: at one and the same time, he relied on them to make his breakthrough into literary respectability while also respecting their well-founded timidity given the draconian manner in which the government was pursuing sedition and libel cases for publications deemed ‘revolutionary’. As his writings explored issues of atheism, free love, incest and political reform, they frequently chose discretion rather than valour, as the latter would have implied both financial ruin and imprisonment. Thus, almost none of Shelley’s work was published in his lifetime. Only The Cenci actually recieved a second edition, while Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems only managed to sell a score of copies. Even Mary suppressed some of his writings in publications she arranged after his death. He had to express his radicalism in his writings, but also had to accept that the world simply wasn’t ready for it.
His major push back against the society of his time was his radicalism. In the Swiss hotel, he famously identified himself (in Greek) as a ‘democrat, a philanthropist, an atheist’ and gave his destination as ‘Hell’. The headstrong and adamant nature of his beliefs led to his break with his father, his expulsion from Oxford, his failure to get his writings published and indirectly, his exile to the continent. I feel that Shelley’s radicalism took precedence over whatever literary pretensions he may have possessed: writing was a mere means to the end of real social reform. His appreciation of the horrific disparities in income in his society, his disgust at the mealy-mouthed pretensions of moral value of religious believers, his fierce opposition to the overt forms of political authoritarianism: all were touchstones of his internal value system. The images of him haranguing a crowd in Dublin, putting his Declaration of Rights into bottles and casting them into the ocean, penning A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout the Kingdom and later A Philosophical View of Reform cover the years from 1812 to 1820 and show how his firm belief in the need for a fundamental reordering of society never left him. Indeed, his fear of a right-wing backlash which would result in an even more authoritarian form of political repression caused him to advise moderation in political change.
Just as significant as Shelley’s pursuit of social justice was his yearning to realize personal love. A book on ‘Shelley and Women’ would indeed have many chapters and provide a truly elusive theme to elucidate. A principled advocate of ‘free love’, a harsh critic of marriage (who nonetheless married twice), a proponent of women’s rights, a declaimer against the sin and degradation of prostitution, Shelley frequently both espoused and sought to live within a broadly communal congregation of like-minded free spirits. The last year of his life began with hopes for Leigh Hunt and Byron to both come to Pisa and work with him on a periodical. For most of his life, his household was never just him and his wife of the time: it always involved some of her relations, domestic servants (usually female) and when possible, friends of either sex staying for extended periods of time. These issues really came to head in late 1818 when he had to write himself in as father on a birth certificate of a child who was not born of his wife. Holmes does a thorough and painstaking job of detective work in proposing that it was the older maid servant with whom Shelley had created this child. At the same time, it would appear that Claire, Mary’s half-sister, had a miscarriage, and Mary herself was or was shortly about to become pregnant with their fourth child. Thus, in one household Shelley may have had conjugal relations with at least two if not more of the female cohabitants. The relationship with Claire was particularly intense: Mary writes of the need for ‘absentia Clariae’ to relieve some of the emotional the proximity of both her and her husband caused her to bear. All through his life, from Miss Hitchener early on to Emilia Viviana and Jane Williams in the final years in Italy, Shelley seems to have been strongly afflicted by a Picasso-like penchant for being attracted by new, comely members of the opposite sex.
These political fervours, sexual desires and problematic personal relations were compounded by his generally poor health. Possible diagnoses include nephritis, consumption, ophthalmia, rheumatism, boils, liver trouble and somewhat doubtfully, epilepsy. However, his restless, active nature seems to have been almost uniformly dominant: he was always going out, even if just for a walk, and these ailments seemed often to coincide with acute tensions in his relations with the different women in his life. It is tempting to conclude that they also seriously affected his writing, but I do not believe this to be the case. Rather, it was his politics that led to the problems encountered in this respect.
‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of the most beautiful poems ever written, and perfectly manages to blend lyric imagery with a general theme of human ambition and destiny. Unfortunately, most of the balance of his writing was either too overblown in its imagery and imaginative sweep or so startlingly prosaic and straightforward as to lack a major thematic thrust. Into the former group I would place Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound, while the latter included Julian and Maddalo as The Cenci. I think he was respectively struggling to either obfuscate his political intentions or bend over backwards in blunting them: both efforts to get around the extreme intolerance with which British society in the early nineteenth century regarded atheism and radicalism. At times, it would appear he simply gave up. Conversant in at least a half dozen languages, he spent considerable time and effort translating Dante, Homer, Goethe and Plato.
Still, he could not stop espousing his causes: his first serious writing was the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, which despite being printed anonymously led to his getting expelled from Oxford. Then, Queen Mab became his first major poetic work. It contains more ‘Notes’ on both atheism and free love than it does actual verses. His final play, Hellas, included a preface which boldly stated that there was a need to win ‘the war of the oppressed against the oppressors … those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers called Sovereigns’. His publisher Ollier excised this passage from its limited publication and it never saw a full printing until 1892. The Peterloo massacre, a rising in Spain, a revolt in Naples, the Greek war for independence from the Turks: all worked to raise his spirits and galvanize the passion he brought to all issues of social and political reform.
If the fragmentary account of the shipwreck which led to his death is correct, it would appear that outward-challenging Shelley won out over the retiring, hesitant part of his persona. With ‘mountainous’ waves threatening, he may have been the one to pushed Williams’ arm away when the latter tried to reef the sails. The ship capsized and all drowned in the storm.
Finally, I have to admit that I probably would not have liked Shelley had I known him. The long periods during which he’d abandon Mary to go on trips up rivers, visiting other towns or to clandestinely meet Claire shows a callousness of respect for the emotional well being of others which existed under his professions of love for all mankind. But then, I’d have to empathize with his almost childlike inability to find a place of comfort in a world which he found so grievously inhumane and unjustly ordered.
A truly wonderful biography. It reminded me of Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens which similarly took an exhaustive degree of research to come to conclusions which were as objective as they were sympathetic.
Highly recommended.
The answer as to the nature of his pursuit is, I believe, both: he was at one and the same time seeking some form of accommodation away from a world and desiring to become both involved in it and work to change it. He felt an almost visceral disgust with the existing political, economic, cultural, religious and governmental structures of authoritarian control and constantly challenged their very values and mores which he found anathema to his touchstones of love and liberty. He was a forthright and rebellious radical. However, he most often sought shelter in isolated cottages or villas which provided shelter from the vicissitudes of contact with the outside world. And then, in a matter of weeks, he’d be on the move again.
This push-me/pull-you tension applies to almost all aspects of Shelley’s life. His personal relations ebbed and flowed: he first adored Godwin from afar, then befriended him, and finally spent years fending off his elder’s financial demands after eloping with his daughter. He had an intense friendship with Hogg until their relation deteriorated while living in the Lake District. The intense devotion he spawned in the schoolteacher Hitchener was matched only by the callousness with which she was later dropped from his family circle. After helping his first wife get away from her family which entailed going against his principles and marrying her, he later lost almost all interest in her. Even his relations with Mary were, after their initial rush of emotional ecstasy, generally nervous, tense, chilling and difficult. He got along well at times with Byron but had to deal with the intimidating effect the much more successful writer had on his own creative output. Other than Mary, his closest emotional attachment was with Claire, her half-sister. The difficulties their relationship posed to the emotional equilibrium of the household were extreme, as was the heartache they both felt after their forced separation.
Relations with his publishers were equally tenuous: at one and the same time, he relied on them to make his breakthrough into literary respectability while also respecting their well-founded timidity given the draconian manner in which the government was pursuing sedition and libel cases for publications deemed ‘revolutionary’. As his writings explored issues of atheism, free love, incest and political reform, they frequently chose discretion rather than valour, as the latter would have implied both financial ruin and imprisonment. Thus, almost none of Shelley’s work was published in his lifetime. Only The Cenci actually recieved a second edition, while Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems only managed to sell a score of copies. Even Mary suppressed some of his writings in publications she arranged after his death. He had to express his radicalism in his writings, but also had to accept that the world simply wasn’t ready for it.
His major push back against the society of his time was his radicalism. In the Swiss hotel, he famously identified himself (in Greek) as a ‘democrat, a philanthropist, an atheist’ and gave his destination as ‘Hell’. The headstrong and adamant nature of his beliefs led to his break with his father, his expulsion from Oxford, his failure to get his writings published and indirectly, his exile to the continent. I feel that Shelley’s radicalism took precedence over whatever literary pretensions he may have possessed: writing was a mere means to the end of real social reform. His appreciation of the horrific disparities in income in his society, his disgust at the mealy-mouthed pretensions of moral value of religious believers, his fierce opposition to the overt forms of political authoritarianism: all were touchstones of his internal value system. The images of him haranguing a crowd in Dublin, putting his Declaration of Rights into bottles and casting them into the ocean, penning A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout the Kingdom and later A Philosophical View of Reform cover the years from 1812 to 1820 and show how his firm belief in the need for a fundamental reordering of society never left him. Indeed, his fear of a right-wing backlash which would result in an even more authoritarian form of political repression caused him to advise moderation in political change.
Just as significant as Shelley’s pursuit of social justice was his yearning to realize personal love. A book on ‘Shelley and Women’ would indeed have many chapters and provide a truly elusive theme to elucidate. A principled advocate of ‘free love’, a harsh critic of marriage (who nonetheless married twice), a proponent of women’s rights, a declaimer against the sin and degradation of prostitution, Shelley frequently both espoused and sought to live within a broadly communal congregation of like-minded free spirits. The last year of his life began with hopes for Leigh Hunt and Byron to both come to Pisa and work with him on a periodical. For most of his life, his household was never just him and his wife of the time: it always involved some of her relations, domestic servants (usually female) and when possible, friends of either sex staying for extended periods of time. These issues really came to head in late 1818 when he had to write himself in as father on a birth certificate of a child who was not born of his wife. Holmes does a thorough and painstaking job of detective work in proposing that it was the older maid servant with whom Shelley had created this child. At the same time, it would appear that Claire, Mary’s half-sister, had a miscarriage, and Mary herself was or was shortly about to become pregnant with their fourth child. Thus, in one household Shelley may have had conjugal relations with at least two if not more of the female cohabitants. The relationship with Claire was particularly intense: Mary writes of the need for ‘absentia Clariae’ to relieve some of the emotional the proximity of both her and her husband caused her to bear. All through his life, from Miss Hitchener early on to Emilia Viviana and Jane Williams in the final years in Italy, Shelley seems to have been strongly afflicted by a Picasso-like penchant for being attracted by new, comely members of the opposite sex.
These political fervours, sexual desires and problematic personal relations were compounded by his generally poor health. Possible diagnoses include nephritis, consumption, ophthalmia, rheumatism, boils, liver trouble and somewhat doubtfully, epilepsy. However, his restless, active nature seems to have been almost uniformly dominant: he was always going out, even if just for a walk, and these ailments seemed often to coincide with acute tensions in his relations with the different women in his life. It is tempting to conclude that they also seriously affected his writing, but I do not believe this to be the case. Rather, it was his politics that led to the problems encountered in this respect.
‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of the most beautiful poems ever written, and perfectly manages to blend lyric imagery with a general theme of human ambition and destiny. Unfortunately, most of the balance of his writing was either too overblown in its imagery and imaginative sweep or so startlingly prosaic and straightforward as to lack a major thematic thrust. Into the former group I would place Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound, while the latter included Julian and Maddalo as The Cenci. I think he was respectively struggling to either obfuscate his political intentions or bend over backwards in blunting them: both efforts to get around the extreme intolerance with which British society in the early nineteenth century regarded atheism and radicalism. At times, it would appear he simply gave up. Conversant in at least a half dozen languages, he spent considerable time and effort translating Dante, Homer, Goethe and Plato.
Still, he could not stop espousing his causes: his first serious writing was the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, which despite being printed anonymously led to his getting expelled from Oxford. Then, Queen Mab became his first major poetic work. It contains more ‘Notes’ on both atheism and free love than it does actual verses. His final play, Hellas, included a preface which boldly stated that there was a need to win ‘the war of the oppressed against the oppressors … those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers called Sovereigns’. His publisher Ollier excised this passage from its limited publication and it never saw a full printing until 1892. The Peterloo massacre, a rising in Spain, a revolt in Naples, the Greek war for independence from the Turks: all worked to raise his spirits and galvanize the passion he brought to all issues of social and political reform.
If the fragmentary account of the shipwreck which led to his death is correct, it would appear that outward-challenging Shelley won out over the retiring, hesitant part of his persona. With ‘mountainous’ waves threatening, he may have been the one to pushed Williams’ arm away when the latter tried to reef the sails. The ship capsized and all drowned in the storm.
Finally, I have to admit that I probably would not have liked Shelley had I known him. The long periods during which he’d abandon Mary to go on trips up rivers, visiting other towns or to clandestinely meet Claire shows a callousness of respect for the emotional well being of others which existed under his professions of love for all mankind. But then, I’d have to empathize with his almost childlike inability to find a place of comfort in a world which he found so grievously inhumane and unjustly ordered.
A truly wonderful biography. It reminded me of Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens which similarly took an exhaustive degree of research to come to conclusions which were as objective as they were sympathetic.
Highly recommended.
January 2, 2016
This is an exhaustive account of Shelley's life and it's pretty exhausting as well. Very well researched and fascinating, if only to prove, once again, that while poets are interesting, and important (Shelley for his political views as well as his verse) my God they're so annoying. I have yet to read a biography of a poet that didn't just make me tired at the thought of trying to live with them. Actually to be fair Shelley gets a lot less annoying as he gets older, so it's a shame on a number of levels that he died so young. And he comes out of this a lot better than Byron. Their relationship is rather interesting though, but it's the dynamic of Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Claremont, Mary's sister, that's particularly intriguing. Tough deal for Harriet Shelley though. And I admit I felt a bit sorry for Shelley's parents, who must have found the whole thing exasperating and sad. However, it's all this mess and pain that feeds the muse, so one can't complain too much.
Holmes has written about Coleridge as well, I might read that once next.
Holmes has written about Coleridge as well, I might read that once next.
March 11, 2018
Three of my favorite literary biographies are Richard Holmes's two-volume Coleridge work and the single volume on Samuel Johnson. So I was pleased to find this out-of-print Shelley bio at a used book sale. I found it tough going, however. Mostly out of ignorance, I'm not a fan of Shelley's longer poems. I also found him, at least in this biography, to be an unsympathetic figure who ruined the lives of several women and, despite many financial difficulties, never seemed to consider WORKING. I believe this is Richard Holmes's first major biography. It's full of quotes from Shelley's poetry and tells you what Shelley did Monday through Friday plus Saturday and Sunday. If you want that, it's here. I have to believe Holmes got more skillful at picking and choosing details as his career progressed, however.
July 8, 2008
A detailed, fascinating portrait of Shelley. It certainly doesn't do Shelley any big favors, but it gives an interesting context for his works.
September 19, 2008
A marvel.
February 9, 2019
I bought this book on April 13, 2001 at the Keats-Shelley Museum in Rome. It was a no-brainer. I was there on a Keats pilgrimage but was also eager to read about Shelley.
This will always be the definitive biography of Percy Shelley. I often think that Shelley mirrors William Blake in a number of ways: radical in vision, scorned as mad by the general public, largely neglected, unknown, and unpublished in their lifetime, both were nonetheless the hidden "MVPs" of the Romantic movement. While Byron and Wordsworth deserved their popularity, their poetry remains relatively conservative in their maturity, only achieving poetic revolution in their early years. Shelley never compromised. Openly scornful of aristocrats (partially in rebellion to his father), proudly and openly atheistic, and a practitioner of free love, Shelley lived in pursuit of an ideal. While this complicates our view of him as a man (he was far from perfect), it explains his restless experimentation within poetry. In fact, Shelley was just beginning to reach his artistic maturity in the years before his drowning in the Gulf of Spezia.
This book is a mirror of the Romantic journey itself. Holmes brilliantly explores the idiosyncrasies of the poetry, and the trials of the Shelley household alone are worth the read (step sister Claire Claremont in tow always complicated things and may have indeed been a bit insane). Intrigue, lots of babies, lots of attractions - sometimes extramarital, lots of larger than life figures: this is what literary biography can achieve in the hands of a master like Richard Holmes. One of my favorite non-fiction books ever.
This will always be the definitive biography of Percy Shelley. I often think that Shelley mirrors William Blake in a number of ways: radical in vision, scorned as mad by the general public, largely neglected, unknown, and unpublished in their lifetime, both were nonetheless the hidden "MVPs" of the Romantic movement. While Byron and Wordsworth deserved their popularity, their poetry remains relatively conservative in their maturity, only achieving poetic revolution in their early years. Shelley never compromised. Openly scornful of aristocrats (partially in rebellion to his father), proudly and openly atheistic, and a practitioner of free love, Shelley lived in pursuit of an ideal. While this complicates our view of him as a man (he was far from perfect), it explains his restless experimentation within poetry. In fact, Shelley was just beginning to reach his artistic maturity in the years before his drowning in the Gulf of Spezia.
This book is a mirror of the Romantic journey itself. Holmes brilliantly explores the idiosyncrasies of the poetry, and the trials of the Shelley household alone are worth the read (step sister Claire Claremont in tow always complicated things and may have indeed been a bit insane). Intrigue, lots of babies, lots of attractions - sometimes extramarital, lots of larger than life figures: this is what literary biography can achieve in the hands of a master like Richard Holmes. One of my favorite non-fiction books ever.
June 15, 2021
I have to say I really enjoyed this, and was engaged practically all the way through, but as biographies go, 700+ pages of often an almost day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the life of a guy who died before he was 30 is kind of a Lot if you're not already interested in the subject matter. Still, I'm impressed at the care and thoroughness with which Holmes dealt with most everything, especially the Shelley-Mary-Claire relationship, because although everyone's flaws (Shelley's particularly!) are very evident, no one ends up unfairly painted as the villain. I'm also obsessed with practically all the descriptive sketches of all the side characters in their circles.
More than anything I think I almost have a newfound pity and sadness for Shelley, actually, because putting all the poetry in better personal/political contexts brought out the ongoing difficulties he had in publishing anything, and the lack of recognition in his lifetime, and makes me wonder how different the reception to him might have been if some of those poems had been more widely read at the time when they would have had most impact. (I am VERY INVESTED in the brief notes made about his impact on the Chartists, I desperately want to do some further reading there.)
Anyway, that damning obit in the paper ("Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.") hurts me even more now somehow. Brb, having Some Emotions about death & fame & poetry.
More than anything I think I almost have a newfound pity and sadness for Shelley, actually, because putting all the poetry in better personal/political contexts brought out the ongoing difficulties he had in publishing anything, and the lack of recognition in his lifetime, and makes me wonder how different the reception to him might have been if some of those poems had been more widely read at the time when they would have had most impact. (I am VERY INVESTED in the brief notes made about his impact on the Chartists, I desperately want to do some further reading there.)
Anyway, that damning obit in the paper ("Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.") hurts me even more now somehow. Brb, having Some Emotions about death & fame & poetry.
November 27, 2022
"There will always be Shelley lovers, but this book is not for them."
A powerful opening sentence for an uncompromising biography. Don't think this is a hitpiece, though: Holmes does a stellar job of balancing the brilliance of Shelley's artistry with the confusing, angering aspects of his personality, and in so doing, he humanizes the Romantic era's most idealized figure. This is recognized as one of the great literary biographies, and I will not dispute that title in any way.
A powerful opening sentence for an uncompromising biography. Don't think this is a hitpiece, though: Holmes does a stellar job of balancing the brilliance of Shelley's artistry with the confusing, angering aspects of his personality, and in so doing, he humanizes the Romantic era's most idealized figure. This is recognized as one of the great literary biographies, and I will not dispute that title in any way.
December 16, 2017
Holmes, in this first biography showed all the skills that I enjoyed some years ago reading his work on Coleridge. He quotes extensively from the works and relates them brilliantly to the circumstances and the people's lives. I enjoyed Coleridge more, probably because I found more empathy with him while Shelley became more like the 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' Byron. In my more sympathetic times during this long reading, I found Shelley as a victim of his class, his tyrannical father and his times in which his atheism could land him in gaol or hung, drawn and quartered as a traitor. After his notorious death, sailing in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia, Italy, a journalist in England gloated over the news in The Courier: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no.”
The intricacies of Shelley's relationships with the brilliant women who loved him, the Wollstonecraft-Godwin half sisters Claire and Mary and Harriet, his first wife, are fully explored. The early 19th century revolutionary times spread terror among the English ruling class who were probably equally appalled by free love and Shelley's menage a quatre as they feared the threat of political freedom. Publishers were imprisoned for printing Tom Paine so Shelly's political pamphlets and poems were understandably difficult even for a sympathetic publisher and so many only appeared decades after his death.
They, with the exception of Harriet, were so young, Mary eloped at 16 with Shelly aged 19. He died at 30 and even Byron was only 34 when he died in Greece. They had that romantic fervour that Wordsworth celebrated but in their terms, betrayed. Reform was successfully prevented in England and Holmes reveals how violently it was opposed by writing of those less celebrated atrocities that occurred before the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 which so many historians and school curricula have downplayed, whereas here, to me it read as an equivalent to the horrors of Tienanmen Square or Sharpeville in our time. Shelley's response came in a dramatic poem, The Mask of Anarchy, hitherto unknown to me which passionately condemns the official murders but also explores the state's use of argent provocateurs and spies, a situation only too well known to me during the Vietnam war period. My reading of his Ode to the West Wind was completely changed: a nature poem became a political call for hope written response to circumstance similar to the Arab Spring of our time.
Holmes, by revealing these less popular or well known works, including fragments and unfinished works helped me understand a poet, not so much in pursuit, but driven to defy his class but never escaping it. For example, he retained that atrocious aristocratic disdain for paying his debts to the lesser orders although he retained his servants over many years and generally had good relationships with them. The fascinating minutiae revealed by diligent research appeared frequently: Ozymandias was developed from a poorer version that resulted from a bet made by his two friends who each wrote a poem on the newly fashionable subject of Egyptian archaeology. Shelley's intellectual brilliance was shown in his many translations from Greek and Roman classics of philosophy, drama and poetry to Dante, Schiller and Goethe. His early death prevented him from developing completely away from his classic inheritance to become the greatest poet of the century. And politically, just imagine, in his Italian exile, linking up with Mazzini, Garibaldi and the Risorgimento, or in England leading successful Chartists in a revolution of 1848.
The intricacies of Shelley's relationships with the brilliant women who loved him, the Wollstonecraft-Godwin half sisters Claire and Mary and Harriet, his first wife, are fully explored. The early 19th century revolutionary times spread terror among the English ruling class who were probably equally appalled by free love and Shelley's menage a quatre as they feared the threat of political freedom. Publishers were imprisoned for printing Tom Paine so Shelly's political pamphlets and poems were understandably difficult even for a sympathetic publisher and so many only appeared decades after his death.
They, with the exception of Harriet, were so young, Mary eloped at 16 with Shelly aged 19. He died at 30 and even Byron was only 34 when he died in Greece. They had that romantic fervour that Wordsworth celebrated but in their terms, betrayed. Reform was successfully prevented in England and Holmes reveals how violently it was opposed by writing of those less celebrated atrocities that occurred before the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 which so many historians and school curricula have downplayed, whereas here, to me it read as an equivalent to the horrors of Tienanmen Square or Sharpeville in our time. Shelley's response came in a dramatic poem, The Mask of Anarchy, hitherto unknown to me which passionately condemns the official murders but also explores the state's use of argent provocateurs and spies, a situation only too well known to me during the Vietnam war period. My reading of his Ode to the West Wind was completely changed: a nature poem became a political call for hope written response to circumstance similar to the Arab Spring of our time.
Holmes, by revealing these less popular or well known works, including fragments and unfinished works helped me understand a poet, not so much in pursuit, but driven to defy his class but never escaping it. For example, he retained that atrocious aristocratic disdain for paying his debts to the lesser orders although he retained his servants over many years and generally had good relationships with them. The fascinating minutiae revealed by diligent research appeared frequently: Ozymandias was developed from a poorer version that resulted from a bet made by his two friends who each wrote a poem on the newly fashionable subject of Egyptian archaeology. Shelley's intellectual brilliance was shown in his many translations from Greek and Roman classics of philosophy, drama and poetry to Dante, Schiller and Goethe. His early death prevented him from developing completely away from his classic inheritance to become the greatest poet of the century. And politically, just imagine, in his Italian exile, linking up with Mazzini, Garibaldi and the Risorgimento, or in England leading successful Chartists in a revolution of 1848.
January 6, 2020
Man. I truly did NOT believe this massive tome would ever end! Let me put it another way.... If Shelley was still alive, and a biography was released filled with such excruciating minutia, the author would probably be accused of stalking. Maybe I would feel different if I were a super-fan of Shelley, but I didn't read this book for him. I mainly read this book to learn more about his different relationships with A) the women of his life: Was there ever a time he loved Harriet? Was Mary really the catalyst for him leaving Harriet or was something more at play? How did he react to Harriet's suicide? What was life like with Mary? How did Claire fit in to all of this? Was he willing or even capable of supporting Mary after the tragic losses of their children? (No.); and B) Godwin & Byron: Was Godwin as big a jerk as I thought he was? (Yes!) How did Byron & Shelley's relationships grow/change from Geneva to Italy? Was the friendship more one-sided or did both men benefit from the relationship? etc.
All in all, this is a very detailed biography of one of the most complicated creatures I've come across in a long time. You can also tell it was Mr Holmes' first biography, and his enthusiasm for his subject dances off every page. That's part of the problem. This is not to say I didn't appreciate his efforts--if reading it felt like months, researching it must've taken years!--quite the contrary. I just wish when he revisited this biography, Mr Holmes would've used the skills he acquired in later biographies & implemented them here.
All in all, this is a very detailed biography of one of the most complicated creatures I've come across in a long time. You can also tell it was Mr Holmes' first biography, and his enthusiasm for his subject dances off every page. That's part of the problem. This is not to say I didn't appreciate his efforts--if reading it felt like months, researching it must've taken years!--quite the contrary. I just wish when he revisited this biography, Mr Holmes would've used the skills he acquired in later biographies & implemented them here.
April 28, 2018
Not only was Shelley a stunning human being, a forward-looking thinker and poet of renown, he was also very brave. Sent down from Oxford university and banished by his family for publicly denouncing Christianity, criticising the monarchy, and expounding free love for men and women, he also put out leaflets to support working men and encouraged unrest and demands for better working conditions, pay, and leisure. When some men were executed for these demands, he set up schemes to support their families. To avoid his own arrest, he escaped abroad from the age of 22 and although always in debt, took with him Mary Shelley when she was just 16 years old and her step sister, Claire. The three travelled round Europe together in a 'platonic' ménage-a-tois while Shelley wrote his poetic masterpieces. Shelley was just 29 years old when he drowned in a storm crossing the Gulf of Spezia. Letters and journals detail almost every day of Shelley's life which include his friendships with Byron and other leading thinkers and poets of the day but 733 pages require dedicated reading!
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May 24, 2018
Extraordinary, compellingly readable biography with beautifully clear sensitive forthright vigorous subtle language and conception worthy of Shelley himself. This biography is an amazing achievement. Holmes gives us the unique, complex, dazzling and exasperating subject in intimate connection with his fascinating intergenerational political, historical, social, psycho-familial, intellectual, literary and critical setting. The scholarship required to achieve this is slightly mind-boggling but the best thing of all is the text wears it lightly. Yet there is nothing airy fairy about this work; quite the opposite.
I've read some magisterial biographies but Richard Holmes must be the ultimate master of the form.
This is completely satisfying and yet makes you hungry for more. There's no end of desire and fulfilment and renewed desire in the world of this book. The pursuit, indeed.
I'm three chapters from the end and I know I'm gonna cry myself sick this weekend when I'm finally forced to read that dreaded last chapter. I'll probably then turn back to page one and start again.
I've read some magisterial biographies but Richard Holmes must be the ultimate master of the form.
This is completely satisfying and yet makes you hungry for more. There's no end of desire and fulfilment and renewed desire in the world of this book. The pursuit, indeed.
I'm three chapters from the end and I know I'm gonna cry myself sick this weekend when I'm finally forced to read that dreaded last chapter. I'll probably then turn back to page one and start again.
November 22, 2018
How does one die before their 30th birthday and still leave behind enough material for a 700 page biography? Here it is, warts and all. By the time it gets past his disastrous college attempt, this is nearly a weekly, and often daily, account of Shelley's life. Some of the longer bits of literary analysis, where they don't bear directly on S helley's biography or ideas, gets a bit tedious but this is really an extraordinary work.
May 14, 2007
This has got to be the best biography on any British Romantic figure. Richard Holmes is a master biographer; he makes it an art... Well worth the time spent to conquer such a massive book.
November 20, 2022
This one took a long time to read - partly because I took a summer hiatus - but mostly because it is super long and dense. I spent the first quarter of the book feeling Shelley, with his self absorption and manipulation, would have been an extremely annoying friend. Even his politics, which seem like they are they best part of him, were annoyingly self-righteous and self-centered, good at pointing out where others went wrong, but not so great at checking his own incredible privilege. The number of working and middle class people he took financial advantage of in his first 5 years as an 'independent adult' was shameful.
Once connected with Mary and when poor Harriet is out of the picture, he becomes a more sympathetic character -- though still someone who would be absolutely exhausting to be friends with, let alone be married to. His time in London and Italy was fascinating. Holmes quotes copiously from gossipy letters and diaries of the literary community that swirled around Shelley, which was very enjoyable. By the end - and this is not a spoiler - our man Shelley dies, and by that point, I was enmeshed in his story and wanted much more of a wrap up on all those surrounding him, on how his death was received, and how his reputation was resurrected.
I've read the Holmes' Coleridge biographies and think those are more controlled and polished than the Shelley biography. Reading this, especially at first, feels a bit like being in a fever dream. It was obviously an immersive experience for Holmes and you feel that in the writing. I do wish his editor had been a bit more hands' on with Holmes' writing - in particular, his paragraphs were massive blocks that would have been easier to digest in somewhat smaller pieces. Still, this is a masterpiece of biography and I am so glad I read it.
Once connected with Mary and when poor Harriet is out of the picture, he becomes a more sympathetic character -- though still someone who would be absolutely exhausting to be friends with, let alone be married to. His time in London and Italy was fascinating. Holmes quotes copiously from gossipy letters and diaries of the literary community that swirled around Shelley, which was very enjoyable. By the end - and this is not a spoiler - our man Shelley dies, and by that point, I was enmeshed in his story and wanted much more of a wrap up on all those surrounding him, on how his death was received, and how his reputation was resurrected.
I've read the Holmes' Coleridge biographies and think those are more controlled and polished than the Shelley biography. Reading this, especially at first, feels a bit like being in a fever dream. It was obviously an immersive experience for Holmes and you feel that in the writing. I do wish his editor had been a bit more hands' on with Holmes' writing - in particular, his paragraphs were massive blocks that would have been easier to digest in somewhat smaller pieces. Still, this is a masterpiece of biography and I am so glad I read it.
August 7, 2023
Percy is my historical crush. While I can admit as an informative piece, this biography might work really well, I don’t believe it manages to capture his soothingly romantic and visionary mind.
Yet my rating remains biased. For it is still Percy and I know I’d have been head over heels in love with him if it weren’t for the two centuries long age gap.
Yet my rating remains biased. For it is still Percy and I know I’d have been head over heels in love with him if it weren’t for the two centuries long age gap.
January 14, 2018
An excellent biography of a great poet.
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