This book is a collection of anecdotes and stories about the life of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The editor, Richard Henry Stoddard, provides commentary and context for each anecdote. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Today, Percy Bysshe Shelley is an emblem of the Romantic movement and one of the lights of English culture--his poems memorized by schoolchildren, his life honored with a memorial in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. That wasn't always the case, however. In his own day, Shelley was widely loathed, seen as an immoral atheist and a traitor to his class for his revolutionary politics. His work was damned as well, receiving scathing reviews rooted as much in disapproval of his politics and personal life as in the verse itself. That's the Shelley that Jacqueline Mulhallen brings to life in this accessible, political biography: the Shelley who, though writing when the working class was in its infancy, clearly grasped--and wanted to change--the system of oppression under which laborers and women lived. The revolutionary Shelley, Mulhallen shows, has long served as an inspiration to figures from Karl Marx to W. B. Yeats to the poets and writers of today, and for popular movements like the Chartists and the suffragettes, even as his public image and poetry became part of the establishment. An engaging look at one of English history and literature's most compelling, complicated, and talented figures, Percy Bysshe Shelley will be a valuable contribution to our understanding of the man and his work.

In 1810, while still at Eton, Percy Bysshe Shelley published Zastrozzi, the first of his two early Gothic prose romances. He published the second, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, a year later. These sensationalist novels present some of Shelley’s earliest thoughts on irresponsible self-indulgence and violent revenge, and offer remarkable insight into an imagination that is strikingly modern. This new Broadview Literary Texts edition also brings together the fragmentary remains of Shelley’s other prose fiction, including his chapbook, Wolfstein, and contemporary reviews both by Shelley and about his work.

Excerpt from Anecdote Biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley Of all the poets who have illustrated the Literature of England, there is no one whose life presents so many difficulties to the biographer as Percy Bysshe Shelley. Every poet, even the humblest, differs in some respects from the majority of mankind, - at any rate, he is more impressionable than his prosaic brethren, and more easily influenced by the spirit which possesses him. The outward facts of his life arc easily ascertained, and their arrangement in an orderly manner requires no great skill. What requires the greatest skill is the detection and interpretation of the spiritual facts of his life, the motives which actuated him, which guided him to goodness, and which drove him to evil; the angelic impulses by which he soared, the demoniac impulses by which he sank, - in a word, the thorough understanding of his heart, his mind, his genius. The ideal poetic biographer, when he comes, will be a poet who is more than a poet. He does not exist at present. What does exist is the average biographer, whose self-imposed mission is to convince his readers that his hero was either the best or worst of men. Yesterday he was Dr. Griswold, to-day he is Mr. Ingram, to-marrow he will be - who? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.