Shelley

Shelley: The Pursuit is a 1974 biography of the English Romantic poet by Richard Holmes, a renowned British literary biographer best-known for his two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Shelley: The Pursuit sets out to undermine the long-standing image of Shelley as a bland, mystical poetic visionary. Holmes argues that his subject is an altogether “darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure.” He traces Shelley’s poetic and political radicalism to a mutinous streak in his character: Shelley was expelled from Oxford University, disowned by his aristocrat father, and forced into exile. Shelley: The Pursuit is widely regarded as the standard text on the poet’s life, and as a masterpiece of literary biography in its own right.

Shelley was born in 1792, in Sussex, England, the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, a landowner and Member of Parliament in the Whig faction. He had a happy, countryside childhood. When he was twelve, he was sent to Eton College, where he was initially badly bullied. His early experiences at the school caused him to reject its culture: he refused to participate in sports or “fagging” (a practice in which younger boys function as servants to older ones). As a result, he earned the nickname “Mad Shelley.” Academically, his main interest was in science, and he used his knowledge to create havoc. On one occasion, he blew up a tree on the school grounds with gunpowder. Holmes sees Shelley’s behavior at school as an early indication of his truculent non-conformism.

In 1810, Shelley went up to Oxford University, where he spent most of his time reading and working on his own writing. He published two novels and two collections of subversive verse under pseudonyms while still a student. In 1811, he published a pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism.” He was brought before his college’s administrators, where he refused to deny writing the pamphlet. He was expelled. His father intervened and Shelley was offered the chance to return to university if he recanted his atheistic views. Shelley again refused, to Sir Timothy’s great displeasure.



Four months later, Shelley, then nineteen, eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a friend of his sisters’. Sir Timothy cut off Shelley’s allowance and partially disowned him. For a while, Shelley lived in an unconventional household made up of him and Harriet, Harriet’s sister Eliza (whom Shelley disliked) and Shelley’s friend Thomas Hogg.

Shelley met the poet Robert Southey, who encouraged him to contact the political radical William Godwin. His marriage with Eliza broke down, and Shelley began spending more time at Godwin’s home, where he fell in love with Godwin’s daughter Mary, threatening to commit suicide if she did not reciprocate his feelings. In 1814, Shelley abandoned Eliza (then pregnant with Shelley’s son) and left for the continent with Mary and her stepsister Claire Clairemont. Upon their return, Godwin refused to see them, and Shelley rented a remote cottage in Surrey, where he wrote Alastor, his first major poetical work.

In 1816, through Mary and Claire, Shelley met the poet Lord Byron. The foursome lived together in Switzerland, and the period gave rise to masterpieces by Byron (Don Juan), Mary (Frankenstein) and Shelley (“Mont Blanc,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”). Byron had a child with Claire, whom Shelley offered to support.



Later that year, Harriet committed suicide. Holmes considers evidence that she felt abandoned by Shelley and concludes that it is more likely that she felt abandoned by a new lover whose letters she had stopped receiving, since Shelley had made generous provision for her. Shelley married Mary, but Harriet denied him custody of his children on the grounds that he was an atheist. While living with Mary in Buckinghamshire, Shelley composed “Ozymandias,” as a result of a bet with a friend to see who could write the best poem on the subject of the newly recovered bust of Ramesses II.

In 1818, the Shelleys went to Venice to visit Byron with Claire and her daughter by Byron, Allegra. In Venice, Shelley began Prometheus Unbound, considered by many his masterpiece. During that first year in Italy, two of Shelley’s children died.

From 1819 onwards, the Shelleys began moving in radical circles, and Shelley’s political views developed and deepened. Holmes stresses that Shelley’s later work can only be fully understood in the context of his political thought: for instance, “Ode to the West Wind” was conceived, Holmes argues, primarily as a prayer for political revolution.



Shelley drowned in 1822, when his sailboat was caught in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia. Controversy has surrounded his death ever since, with some commentators maintaining that the boat wasn’t seaworthy, and others that Shelley was attacked by pirates. Holmes raises the possibility that Shelley might have set out into the storm with suicidal intent. When his body was recovered, it was burned due to quarantine rules in force in the area. An English journalist gloated, “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no.”

Holmes’s biography was received enthusiastically, with the New Yorker crediting him with achieving “a superlative in biography: its subject’s presence—that of a disturbing, seductive, gifted, destructive man whose essence is mutiny.” Some reviewers, however, noted that Holmes occasionally errs on the side of excessive detail: “Holmes has compiled such an enormous mountain of data, with extensive documentation from memoirs, journals, and correspondence, that one knows the schedules, expenditures and swings of mood of Shelley and his circle virtually from week to week.” (Kirkus)