"Proserpine and Midas" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Proserpine is based on Ovid's tale of the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto, which itself was based on the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. Mary Shelley's version focuses on the female characters. In a largely feminist retelling from Ceres's point of view, Shelley emphasises the separation of mother and daughter and the strength offered by a community of women. Midas combines the stories of the musical contest between Apollo and Pan and that of King Midas and his ability to turn everything he touches to gold and comments on the definitions of femininity and masculinity in the early nineteenth century.

Proserpine and Midas (1820) is a collection of plays by Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Combining Mary’s blank verse and Percy’s lyric poems, the Shelleys offer two groundbreaking retellings of classical myth. Together, the plays illuminate the working relationship of a husband and wife who helped define Romanticism, highlighting their individual talents in the process. While Proserpine was published in 1832 in The Winter’s Wreath, a London periodical, Mary Shelley was unable to find a publisher for Midas, which remained unprinted until the twentieth century. Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, leaves her daughter Proserpine in the care of two trusted nymphs. While the women are out picking flowers, Proserpine is kidnapped by Pluto, the dreaded lord of the underworld. Distraught, Ceres laments the loss of her beloved girl and appeals to Jove for assistance. Proserpine is a retelling of an ancient myth which remains mostly faithful to its source while emphasizing the feminist qualities of its tragic content. In Midas, the wild god Pan is defeated in a musical competition by Apollo, god of the sun. Determined to claim victory, he arranges a new contest with King Midas as judge. Although his power on earth is unmatched by any human, Midas soon learns that to play at divinity one risks reaping the greatest of sorrows. Proserpine and Midas is a masterful take on two of ancient Greece’s central myths. Using their talents for narrative and song, the Shelleys adapt these well-known stories for the nineteenth century and beyond, showcasing their sociopolitical significance in a world defined by the democratic ideals of the Greeks. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Proserpine and Midas is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

These eight volumes contain the works of Mary Shelley and include introductions and prefatory notes to each volume. Included in this edition are "Frankenstein" (1818), "Matilda" ((1819), "Valperga" (1823), "The Last Man" (1826), "Perkin Warbeck" (1830) and "Lodore" (1835).

This collection covers the lyrical poetry of Mary Shelley, as well as her writings for Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia of Biography" and some other materials only recently attributed to her.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic poets, and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English language. This is the third volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. Most of the poems in the present volume were composed between autumn 1819 and autumn 1820. The poems written in response to the political crisis in England following the ‘Peterloo’ massacre in August 1819 feature largely, among them The Mask of Anarchy and 'An Ode (Arise, arise, arise!)'. The popular songs, which Shelley intended to gather into a volume to inspire reformers from the labouring classes, several accompanied by significantly new textual material recovered from draft manuscripts, are included, as are the important political works 'Ode to Liberty', 'Ode to Naples' and Oedipus Tyrannus, Shelley's burlesque Greek tragedy on the Queen Caroline affair. Other major poems featured include 'The Sensitive-Plant', 'Ode to the West Wind', 'Letter to Maria Gisborne', an exuberant translation from the ancient Greek of the Homeric 'Hymn to Mercury', and the brilliantly inventive 'The Witch of Atlas'. In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies, a chronology of Shelley’s life, and indexes to titles and first lines. Leigh Hunt's informative Preface of 1832 to The Mask of Anarchy is also included as an Appendix. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley's poetry available to students and scholars.

Keats and Shelley: Winds of Light combines unrivalled textual knowledge, biographical and contextual expertise, and profoundly insightful close readings of the poetry in a selection of outstanding essays from a leading critic of English Romantic Poetry. Some of the essays have been previously published and are established as classic studies, which have strongly influenced scholarly interpretation of the poems they discuss, including landmark readings of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, 'Julian and Maddalo' and 'Ozymandias', and Keats's 'Isabella: or the Pot of Basil' and his sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. These are brought into relationship with new work on the two poets, in a wide-ranging set of meditations which centre on Shelley's great elegy for Keats, Adonais. An introductory chapter considers the strongly contrasting poetic styles and achievement of the two iconic 'young Romantics', a contrast which has been obscured by their conventional close pairing in popular culture. Five studies of Keats are followed by a pivotal account of Shelley's elaborately-wrought poetic tribute to Keats's destined greatness, which leads in to a balancing six studies of Shelley. Both poets are situated illuminatingly in their literary, personal, and social-historical milieu, through a series of perspectives which combine lucid particularity with powerful generalization. The essays move from detailed analysis of textual minutiae to deep reflection on fundamental themes in the work of Keats and Shelley, including the ultimate themes of transience and permanence, and of life, death, and immortality.