Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself

In her own quest to understand Shelley, Ann Wroe takes up the questions that consume the poet himself: Who, or what, was he? What was his purpose? Where had he come from? And where was he going? By answering those questions, Shelley sought to free and empower not only himself, but the entire human race. His revolution would shatter the Earth’s illusions, shock men and women with new visions, find true love and liberty--and take everyone with him.

Now, for the first time, this passionate and radical quest is put at the center of Shelley’s life. The result is a Shelley who has never been seen in biography before.

From Ann Wroe, a biographer of the first rank, comes a startlingly original look at one of the greatest poets in the Western tradition.

Being Shelley aims to turn the poet's life inside out: rather than tracing the external events of his life, she tracks the inner journey of a spirit struggling to create. In her quest to understand the radically unconventional Shelley, Wroe pursues the questions that consumed the poet himself. Shelley sought to free and empower the entire human race; his revolution was meant to shatter illusions, shock men and women with new visions, find true love and liberty—and take everyone with him. Now, for the first time, this passionate quest is put at the center of his life. The result is a Shelley who has never been seen in biography before.

Kirkus Reviews

From Economist editor and biographer Wroe (The Perfect Prince, 2003, etc.), a dreamy, decidedly unorthodox biography of the Romantic poet. Wroe hastily dispatches the biographical facts, then subsequently jumps around, dropping names and dates she assumes the reader is familiar with. Born in Sussex in 1792 to a landowner and MP against whom he violently rebelled, Shelley attended Eton and Oxford, from which he was expelled in 1811 for an incendiary pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism. He capped off an epistolary romance by eloping with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, whom he abandoned within two years. In 1814, he ran off with Mary Godwin, the daughter of philosopher William Godwin (who had been Shelley's mentor) and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In Pisa and Florence, Mary and Percy wrote, lived beyond their means, maintained friendships with Byron and others, then grew estranged as Shelley flirted with their neighbor, Jane Williams. He drowned while sailing with her husband in 1822. For Wroe, these facts are far less important than Shelley's intense devotion to beauty and to the poet's role as seer. He dedicated his life to those ideals, probably under a heavy addiction to laudanum. Essential here are the author's profound readings of and sympathy for Shelley's poetry, from Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound to A Defence of Poetry. She also nicely documents Shelley's sense of social justice on the one hand, his flagrant egoism on the other. Hallucinatory and quite mad (Shelley would approve): helpful in deciphering his work but hardly his life. Agent: Andrew Wylie/The Wylie Agency

Ann Wroe is the author of Pontius Pilate, a finalist for the samuel Johnson Prize, A Fool and His Money, and The Perfect Prince. She received her doctorate in medieval history from Oxford and is a senior editor at The Economist. She lives in London with her husband and their three sons.