Publisher's Weekly Review
Long before the lost generation or '60s rock poets, there was a 19th-century movable feast of interlinked English poets and thinkers that was even more fascinating and combustible. Cambridge Ph.D. Hay, in her first book, delves with scholarly relish into the unorthodox lifestyles and fluid (including quasi-incestuous and incestuous) households of several key figures: vegetarians Percy and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Mary Shelley's stepsister Jane, aka Claire Clairmont; Lord Byron; John Keats; and the little-read today but central revolutionary, Leigh Hunt. The key years are 1813 to 1822, effectively terminating with Shelley's drowning at sea not long after Keats's death from tuberculosis. New here is Claire's autobiographical fragment-archived in the New York Public Library-in which she rakes the libertarians Shelley and Byron, whose daughter she bore, over her emotional coals. Well handled is the so-called summer of Frankenstein, and how, over the nine years Hay chronicles, the boundaries of monogamy were pushed to the breaking point. Although Hay is passionate about her subject, her writing is unexceptional and monotone: she sticks to the descriptive rather than the analytic. 16 pages of b&w illus. (May 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
SINCE 1998, the New York Public Library has housed a manuscript so blistering that researchers are probably required to don oven mitts before handling it. Consisting of a long-overlooked autobiographical fragment by Claire Clairmont, who was Mary Shelley's stepsister, Lord Byron's lover and the inspiration for Henry James's "Aspern Papers," it has the declared intention of showing what "evil passion" sprang from the pursuit of free love by Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. "Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love," Clairmont states, "I saw the two first poets of England . . . become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery - under the influence of free love Lord B became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women." Her indictment, which Daisy Hay says is now being published for the first time, comes only at the end of "Young Romantics" yet sends a blast of scorching fury back across the entire book. For Clairmont's charges, however hyperbolic, have about them a degree of truth. Not just for her but for Mary Shelley and other women, participating in the communal, proto-1960s life of "English poetry's greatest generation," as Hay's subtitle puts it, was ultimately less thrilling than damaging. This, at least, is the dominant impression I took away from "Young Romantics," even if it isn't Hay's thesis or even drift. Hay's own declared intention is, rather, to go "beyond the image of the isolated poet in order to restore relationships to the center of the Romantic story." To that end, she interweaves a group biography of the later Romantics - Byron, Keats, Leigh Hunt, the Shelleys - with an extended argument that they not only influenced one another but were preoccupied by (if ambivalent about) the very idea of sociability. This argument she makes persuasively enough, even if she's sometimes a bit overzealous in imposing her rubric; as Mark Twain almost put it, to a woman with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But it's as a biographer pure and simple that Hay shines. Despite being almost as youthful as her subjects - she only recently received her doctorate from Cambridge, and "Young Romantics" is her first book - she is a skilled and sure-footed chronicler. In firm, clear, often elegant prose, she narrates the main events in the lives of her subjects from 1813, when they began to coalesce around Hunt in London, till 1822, when Shelley drowned near Livorno, Italy. She also more briefly considers the aftermath of that tragedy; Byron's death in Greece in 1824; the later lives of the remaining figures; and, finally, the struggle over the legacies of Shelley and Byron waged by Hunt and other memoirists. Moving swiftly and purposefully, her story has no longueurs whatsoever, nor even a single lurching transition; it represents a triumph of artful selection and synthesis. If you want to read a single book of modest length on the lives (less so the work) of the later Romantics, this might very well be the one. But if you do read "Young Romantics," be prepared to come away outraged and depressed. The real calamities here aren't so much the early deaths of Shelley and Byron as those of their dependents. Shelley's abandoned first wife committed suicide, and all but one of the four children he had with his second wife, Mary, died young. Claire Clairmont, meanwhile, had the daughter she'd conceived with Byron imperiously stripped from her by the poet, who, quickly tiring of the girl, stuffed her in a convent, where she too soon died. There was also a baby of mysterious parentage, registered as Elena Shelley, who survived only 18 months. In short, the two poets left the Italian peninsula, along with a few spots in England, strewn with dead relations. While they cannot entirely be blamed, it's hard not to conclude that their callousness, selfishness, impulsiveness and bullying demand for "free love" were ruinous to those around them (though in truth only Shelley idealized his lusts, the cynical Byron merely pouncing where he could). This is hardly a fresh observation, of course, but it is powerfully reinforced by "Young Romantics," which brings home to a rare degree just how destructive were the poets' experiments in unfettered living. Even Leigh Hunt, a far more consistently kind and decent chap than Byron or Shelley, made his wife miserable by maintaining an uncomfortably close relationship with her sister and blithely failing to provide for his large brood. Not that Hay harps on any of this. To her great credit, she never lapses into censoriousness, approaching all her characters, men and women alike, with just the right blend of detachment and sympathy. Yet by concentrating so steadily on their relationships, she inevitably draws attention to the imbalances and (as Clairmont insisted) cruelties within them. Her book winds up being as much a study of domestic arrogance as an exploration of friendship. None of which should prevent anyone from reading "Young Romantics" for pleasure of a kind. However tormented, this episode remains one of the most riveting in literary history, an operatic tale brimming with color and variety and passion. To hear it told so nimbly and concisely is to be helplessly swept up into it all once again. Ben Downing is writing a biography of the Anglo-Florentine society figure Janet Ross.
Library Journal Review
The lives of the second generation of English Romantic writers-Leigh Hunt, Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats-are the stuff of melodramatic romance and legend: antiestablishment rebels; successions of wives, mistresses, and lovers; the struggle for recognition; exile; and early death. Following a broadly chronological movement, this debut by Hay shifts back and forth among the circles of friends and families of these writers, from the imprisonment of Hunt to the death of Shelley and its aftermath. While Hay breaks no new ground, Young Romantics is a vigorously written, well-informed, and popularizing page-turner. Verdict The chief limitation of the book-a problem that hampers a number of recent literary biographies-is that it focuses on the human dimensions of the poets rather than the greatness of their poetry. It is accessible, however, and highly recommended for the general reader interested in the lives behind the poems but less so for the specialist.-T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
