Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation

Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspectivecelebrating their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism. The book focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron John Keats and Mary Shelley as well as a host of fascinating lesser-known figures: Mary Shelleys stepsister and Byrons mistress Claire Clairmont; Hunts botanist sister-in-law Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon and Joseph Severn; and writers such as Charles and Mary Lamb Thomas Love Peacock and William Hazlitt. They were characterized by talent idealism and youthful ardor and these qualities shaped and informed their politically oppositional stancesas did their chaotic family arrangements which often left the young women despite their talents facing the consequences of the mens philosophies. In Young Romantics Daisy Hay follows the groups exploits from its inception in Hunts prison cell in 1813 to its disintegration after Shelleys premature death in 1822. It is an enthralling tale of love betrayal sacrifice and friendship all of which were played out against a background of political turbulence and intense literary creativity.