Young Romantics – The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives: Daisy Hay

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.  Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I have been looking for a good biography of Shelley for a while.  Such is the exciting life I lead.  This one has such a beautiful cover, I could not resist.

Daisy Hay is not only writing a biography of an extremely interesting group of people.  She is also challenging the whole (largely self-created) myth of the languid, isolated, floppy-haired Romantic poet, staring off meaningfully into the middle-distance.

Instead, she argues that much of their work came from sparking off each other.  One of the most striking images from the early part of the book is the picture of all these poets, having regular ‘sonnet-off’s,’where they sit down and dash off a work of genius about grasshoppers or whatever.  It sounds like the sort of geeky challenge a book blogger might engage in.  Except, we probably wouldn’t come up with ‘Ozymandias’.

And unlike the introspective early Romantic poets, swooning over daffodils and suchlike, this group came of age in a gloomy, pessimistic era, when the hopes of the French Revolution had been destroyed and government was defined by hypocrisy and corruption.  Poetry became a weapon by which these people defined their ideas and hopes for a better society.

Shelley is the central character in this book, but he doesn’t come off at all well.  This is the man who said ‘the great instrument of moral good is the imagination.’  But his failure to understand why Mary might be a bit depressed having lost three children in four years, and to cheer himself up by flirting with other women, is quite shockingly self-absorbed.

Mary – and to some extent, her sister Claire – is by far the most interesting person in this book.  At first, you think she is going to be an awful person, what with making love on her mother’s grave in order that she can bless their union (a new low in ways you could mess yourself up?) and running away with Shelley after knowing him for about three minutes.  But blimey, does she grow up fast.

As a general rule, the women are much more striking characters than the men.  The men are impractical, selfish, and surprisingly shallow, given all their high-minded ideas.  The women are relegated to more and more conventional roles, as Hay notes drily:

‘it was something of a disappointment for the author of Frankenstien to be reduced to flower picking with a female companion while the men talked politics and poetry.’ (p220)

And of course, the women are left to pick up the pieces.

‘Their unorthodox living arrangements, and the ideals of Shelley and Hunt had variously exposed their lives to public scrutiny and in the case of Mary and Claire, their bodies to illegitimate pregnancy…Now that the men of the group were dead, or living abroad, the women were left behind to count the cost of youthful idealism: damaged reputations, limited earning capacity, and exclusion from polite society.’ (p283)

Since this book deals with so many  characters, we go skimming along the major events of their lives without the groaning levels of detail that you get in some biographies.  In fact, it’s quite astonishing, now I come to think of it, that all of them come across so vividly in only around 300 pages.

This is not one of those dull biographies which tail off towards the end while you wait for the subject to die; since Shelley, Byron and Keats all lived out The Who’s dream and died before they got old.  The group, which had been fracturing anyway, crumbled and fell apart without these gigantic personalities holding it together.  The death of friendship – sometimes through violent argument, sometimes through misunderstandings, sometimes through people naturally growing apart – is as significant as physical death in this book, and possibly just as sad.

‘Their stories demonstrate that friendship is not always easy: that relationships with other people can simultaneously be a source of great strength and of unknowable pain.  But they also show that friendship can be the making of the man’.  (p311)

The only problems I had were at the beginning when it came across as a little bit academicy-I-have-a-theory-it’s-brilliant-though-no-one-has-ever-thought-of-it-before.  After that, it’s a cracking story.  This is Daisy Hay’s first book, and I very much look forward to her next one.  Maybe more Mary next time, please?