Daisy HayReseñas

Young Romantics. The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives is a kind of group biography, describing the lives and involvement of the foremost Romantic poets and writers of the early 19th century. The beginning of the book is a bit heavy-handed and the entire framework of the book is based upon the biography of James Henry Leigh Hunt better known as Leigh Hunt.

Leigh Hunt is now largely forgotten. Of all the writers involved in the Romantic period described in this book he was the most long-lived, born in 1784 and died in August 1859. Although he was a poet, writer and essayist in his own right, as much work went into his publishing business. He was the central figure in the ‘Hunt Circle’ which included great writers such as Charles Lamb, Shelley, William Hazlitt, Benjamin Haydon, Keats and many others.

The book follows a group of writers and their friends as they settle in Italy, and most attention is given to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and Claire Claremont. There are also very interesting appearances of other poets and writers of the period, of course, John Keats, but also for example, Thomas Love Peacock.

A very interesting book to introduce the Romantic writers.

This well-crafted and readable narrative is the biography of a relationship, grounded in the history and culture of 19th century Britain. With sympathy for the main actors -- Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli -- but without sentiment, the book looks at their mutually beneficial, yet self-serving, arrangement: He got her financial support, she got dignity and stature of his public achievement, and the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, with the two developing a perhaps unexpectedly deep regard for each other. The author deftly interweaves anecdotes of other women's lives, illustrating their financially provisional existence. The author also exposes Disraeli's multiple motivations: His early desperate efforts to win public office were motivated in part by the insulation from arrest (for debt) enjoyed by MPs.

Probably more about Leigh Hunt, "who stands at the centre of the circle of talented men and women this book explores," (as Hay--and Hunt--would have it) than most people could possibly want to know. True to the author's stated intention to counter the Romantic "myth" of the isolated artist, this is a group biography of the fluctuating social circles of the Romantics--Byron's Villa Diodati, Hunt's Hampstead, Shelley's Albion House, the Pisan Circle, etc., with a full cast of famous--and less so--characters and equal attention given to the women usually on the periphery. Not an essential read by any means. Sympathetic to the Hunts and Shelleys and unsympathetic to Byron, here a rather one-dimensional, imperious, "touchy and difficult" peer.½

A quick read, essentially an essay in five parts bulked out with full page illustrations, but none the worse for that. Little, I think, that I haven't read before, other than the chapter on Shelley's manuscripts of Frankenstein, which was interesting if (as I've indicted) brief.

I'm struck, as I have been when previously reading of Shelley's life, by the multiple tragedies she endured, from the coldness of, and what must have felt like the rejection by, her father, through multiple bereavement due to disease, suicide and accident, then her own relatively early death from a brain tumour. If her life was a Romantic one (with a capital 'r'), it was also frequently a melancholy and tragic one.

I wanted to love this, but the pacing made it so difficult to get through. This would have been wonderful at say two-thirds the length. As is, it's worth a read, but likely only enjoyable if you love historical biographies.

The Romantics have been a huge part of my life; if it wasn’t for them I may never have become a reader. Problem is, I don’t know much about their lives so I have set out to learn more. Young Romantics by Daisy Hay tells the basic story of their lives, but with the subtitle The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives you can be sure it will be heavily focused on Mary and Claire.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont were fascinating people, however this seems to be the primary focus of more biographies. I was a little surprised when Daisy Hay spends so little time on that fateful time in Geneva that birthed Frankenstein but I assume that she deliberately glossed over that story assuming everyone was aware of it anyway.

Young Romantics did something I didn’t expect and that was spending a lot of time talking about the Hunt brothers. I knew they played a big part in literature at the time and that in context to the Romantics it is relevant information. However I never viewed them as Romantics and often over looked learning about them. This is a mistake on my behalf; the role the Hunts played in the Romantic Movement is an essential part in dealing with context. I might not consider them Romantics but they were there shaping the literary world along side them.

Having discovered a new interest in non-fiction I find myself wanting to read more biographies. While I have a great interest in the Romantics, I found that Young Romantics works to create a basic understanding of their lives. You get a quick overview of the lives of the Shelleys and the Hunts. Unfortunately there isn’t much to do with Lord Byron and even less to do with the others. I would have loved to read more about Keats but he only got a brief look in.

I plan to read more biographies about a range of different authors but I’m sure there will be plenty on the Romantics. I like Young Romantics for the broad strokes approach it took on the Romantics. I learnt a lot from this book but I’m sure people with a great knowledge would have been a little disappointed with it. I think if you have a passing interest in the Romantics this might be the perfect choice.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2014/05/21/young-romantics-by-daisy-hay/

Was surprised how much I enjoyed the telling of the interwoven lives of the romantic poets Shelley, Byron, Keats along with Mary Shelley and the women in their lives. Fascinating insight into a very specific period - and whilst it was of a period, it is quite contemporary particularly how there lives and attitudes change from their idealist late teens' to 20's to their maturating 30's and so on. I think [[Daisy Hay]] has done a great job finding some common threads, in particular Leigh Hunt and Mary Shelley, to tie a potentially messy story into a coherent understanding of the life and times and influences of these influential artists.

Incest! Suicide! Adultery! Child Abandonment! Ménage à trois! Revolution! Free love! Atheism! Vegetarianism! Counter-culture! So, an account of the 1960s? Try 1810s. As the subtitle proclaims, this is about "the Shelleys, Byron, and other tangled lives"--including Keats: "a story of exceptional men and women, who were made by their relationships with one another."

You might know that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was friends with the equally renowned poet Lord Byron and husband to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. You may even know the famous story of the novel's genesis in a challenge that each should write a ghost story. Mary was nineteen then--she was sixteen when she ran away with Shelley--while he was still married to his first wife, who was pregnant at the time. Mary's stepsister Claire ran away with them, and would later give birth to Byron's illegitimate daughter. The coterie were advocates of "free love," which Claire in old age would condemn as a "perfect hell." I have to admit, although far from socially conservative, I'm no fan of "free love" and the wreckage it leaves in its wake, and this book gives plenty of fodder to confirm my opinion. Neither Shelley nor Byron come off well in this group biography, even if Shelley had the excuse of youthful idealism, and seemed more thoughtless than intentionally cruel.

They were all so young though. When this account opens, Mary was fifteen, Shelley twenty and Byron only twenty-four. Shelley wouldn't reach thirty. Keats, who is my favorite of the poets that appears here died at an even more obscenely young age--twenty-five. Not that Keats figures much here--I garnered more of his story from the introduction to my book of his poems than from this book. But the Shelleys are central, and with many of their letters and diaries surviving, Hay is able to paint a very intimate portrait that is psychologically nuanced and astute, and sheds light on the men's work. Keats may be a favorite, but I was underwhelmed by most of what I've read by Percy Shelley, and have read little of Lord Byron. It's to the book's credit it left me wanting to give Shelley another chance, and Lord Byron a try. I might count myself lucky after reading this book not to be in their circle or that of anyone like them, but they certainly left a rich literary legacy. And this is more than a gossipy account of their scandalous "turbulent communal existence"--it grounds them in the intellectual and political ferment of their times.

But, well, can't help but leave you with a link to this comic strip that captured the central relationship in the book well :-) Enjoy!

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=56

A breezy take on Shelly and his fascinating circle. The book is very entertaining when when recounting the events and personalities, peppered with a little gossipy speculation. It becomes tedious, however, when it strays into theories of creativity and relationships; there you glimpse the the books foundation of the doctoral thesis of a gifted writer, but not terribly original thinker. Still, it's a good beach read for the literary minded.

I received Daisy Hay's Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation as a graduation gift, and I went into it with two hopes: one, that it would support my pet theory that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is in part written as a satire at the expense of the insufferable male poets in her life, and that reading about the Romantic poets would be more intriguing than reading Romantic poetry in 100-level English courses.

For the former, I was left more or less where I started. None of the letters and diaries concerning Mary Shelley contained any particular indication that the quietly subverted Romantic tropes in Frankenstein had anything to do with annoyance at Percy Shelley's, Lord Byron's, or anyone else's behavior, although I am perhaps more convinced that, if I were Mary Shelley, that is exactly why I would have put them in there.

As to the latter hope, I was not disappointed. Young Romantics tells a tangled story of a network of famous poets and their less-famous friends and family members, most of whom were very young, very brilliant, and very politically radical. The resulting drama makes their literary legacies—some of the most enduring in English writing—look positively boring in comparison.

There are more or less two central points to the social network that made up the Romantic group, giving the book two main narrative threads which sometimes interweave. The first thread follows journalist and free-speech activist Leigh Hunt, who kicks off the book with a two-year prison sentence for libel due to the political content of his newspaper, The Examiner. In prison and out of it, Hunt made himself and his rooms the epicenter of a salon of radicals, freethinkers, poets and journalists, as well as a rather large group of relatives including his wife Marianne, his botanist sister-in-law Bess, his brother John (co-owner of The Examiner and the only fiscally responsible person in the family), and an enormous brood of children.

The other main narrative thread follows Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, daughter of radical freethinker William Godwin and early feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical anti-monarchist who was expelled from Oxford after writing a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism. Mary, as formidable a creative and intellectual force as her parents, would go on to be best known as the author of Frankenstein; Shelley, despite his political activism, would go on to become the poster boy for underweight, sentimental, tortured poetic genius. In Young Romantics, however, we get to know them as an idealistic young couple, prone to quarreling with their family members and making daring, ill-thought-out decisions, such as eloping to Italy without any money. The most frequently reoccurring characters in Percy and Mary's story include Mary's stepsister and Lord Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron himself, and their illegitimate daughter. Daisy Hay guides us through their personal dramas and literary achievements as the group continually splits up and comes back together again, traveling from England to Italy and back several times. Poems, novels, letters and diaries are written prolifically; children are born, and die, or become the subjects of vicious custody battles. Other Romantic celebrities such as John Keats, Thomas Love Peacock, Charles and Mary Lamb, William Hazlitt, Benjamin Haydon, and Vincent Novello drift in and out of their circle and Leigh Hunt's.

Young Romantics is not just a set of biographic stories of the individual Romantic greats, just as the Romantic movement (or “Cockney school,” as it was called at the time) was more than just a number of individual people who all wrote in a similar style. The Romantic group was held together as a group—as a movement—by a set of commonly shared concerns and principles, many of which are precisely what disposed the Romantic writers' lives so uniquely to such vast amounts of drama. Hay never lets us lose sight of these principles, and the impact they had on even the most deeply personal aspects of the Romantics' lives. Many of them were driven by radical political concerns, particularly freedom of speech, which is part of what caused so many visionaries to congregate around Leigh Hunt's imprisonment and the various liberal publications to come out of the Hunts' press. The Shelley group also tried to live according to principles of free-love, an idealistic, anti-marriage lifestyle that managed to backfire spectacularly upon its practitioners. Before the advent of reliable birth control and under the early nineteenth century's deeply sexist marriage and property laws, free-love was so impracticable that many of the most vocal free-love advocates ended up married. Perhaps the most important common bond of the Romantics, however, was their exploration of the relationship between sociability and creativity. The biographic sketches in the book are full of scenes of geniuses editing and inspiring each other's work, holding writing competitions and penning long epistles to one another. Fictionalized versions of friends and family members feature heavily in the Romantic writers' works, to a degree that they not only became known and mocked for it, but that the reading public began to attribute the fictional aspects of Romantic works to the writer's lives. (This caused serious damage to Bess and Claire's reputations when Hunt and Shelley wrote poems exploring themes of incest.) Daisy Hay balances exploring friendship as a Romantic ideal and chronicling the frequently tense, conflict-ridden actual friendships in question with grace, clarity and thorough research.

This centrality of friendship to the Romantic school raised a new concern following the tragically premature deaths of many of the notable Romantics, particularly Percy Shelley and Lord Byron: the issue of legacy. The surviving members of the network, such as Leigh Hunt and Mary Shelley, spent years battling in writing over the legacies of their dead friends. Biographies, carefully edited posthumous anthologies, and newspaper reviews were the weapons of choice as Shelley, Hunt and even Claire Clairmont angled to cement certain visions of themselves and their social circle into the British imagination. Though most of the cast is dead, the last section in Young Romantics is particularly fascinating to a reader who is truly interested in history, since it does not merely report history as that which happened—it shows how the history of the Romantics, as we usually learn it, was actually made.

Young Romantics is an example of the best sort of non-fiction: meticulously well-researched, full of quirky historical tidbits and telling a story strange and dramatic enough to be fiction. Hay's writing is clear and well-organized, and seamlessly weaves in ample accounts of the subjects' lives in their own words. Though the book contains very little in the way of literary criticism, the links she establishes between the poets' lives and their works has me eyeing the collections of Romantic poetry I've had sitting around untouched for years, and that is no small feat.

It must be admitted that I may, however, merely wind up rereading Frankenstein.