Wild spirit: The story of Percy Bysshe Shelley - Softcover

Margaret-morley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340588667 ISBN 13: 9780340588666

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 1993

Synopsis

A novel based on the passionate and tempestuous life of Shelley, and the contradictions in his life: one minute a loving husband, the next a straying lover; one time a serious philosopher, and then a soaring romantic. It tries to discover the truth behind the legendary figure.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

This fictionalized biography begins awkwardly, but melodramatic scenes and pompous language ultimately give way to a compelling, harshly realistic portrait of the English poet (1792-1822) and his milieu. Morley ( The Summer Woods ) shows the idealistic, iconoclastic and unyielding Shelley attracting worshipful followers even as he is expelled from Oxford for atheism. Married at 19, scraping by on expectation of an inheritance, he wanders through England, Ireland and Wales accompanied by his admirers. Always in pursuit of a utopian community, he seeks out the poet Robert Southey and the philosopher William Godwin, whose daughter Mary instantly seizes upon Shelley as a soul mate. With vigor and a keen eye for venality, hypocrisy and cruelty, Morley depicts the various groups clustered around the charismatic poet. Her descriptions of Shelley's bouts with depression and nightmares create a mood of impending doom that foreshadows his end. An infusion of unnecessary characters and too many scenes of domestic spats among the servants slightly diminish the impact of the final chapters, but overall this is an absorbing story, forcefully told.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Morley's account of Shelley's life disappoints as both fiction and biography. Although the essential facts are presented accurately, the novel fails to penetrate beyond the superficial. Shelley's wife Harriet, William and Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and other familiar players in Shelley's life appear in these pages. Morley talks about Shelley's passionate desire to aid humanity in general and to rescue distressed women in particular, but she does not create a sense of the interior impulses that produced his actions. She spends more time chronicling his endless moves through the British Isles and the Continent than in exploring his personal or literary growth. He comes across as uninteresting, self-centered, and immature, and his early demise brings the reader relief.
- Kathy Piehl, Mankato State Univ., Minn.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0340588667
• ISBN 13: 9780340588666
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 281