Author: Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Biography:
SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822: ODNB)
pseudonym Philopatria, Jr.
He was born at Field Place in Sussex, the eldest of six children of a baronet, Timothy Shelley, and his wife Elizabeth Pilfold. One of his earliest published works, Poems by Victor and Cazire (1810), was written in collaboration with one of his sisters, Elizabeth. Other early writings display a typical range of genres from poetry through prose fiction (Zastrozzi, 1810, written while he was still at Eton) to provocative pamphleteering. The Necessity of Atheism (1811), written with his fellow student Thomas Jefferson Hogg, got them both expelled from University College Oxford. From the time that he eloped with and married 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, a schoolmate of his sisters, in 1811, he was cut off by his family and lived a nomadic life beset with financial problems and perpetually under risk of prosecution for blasphemy or sedition. He and Harriet had two children but he abandoned them for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1814. He and Mary, often joined by her step-sister Claire Clairmont, lived in rented lodgings in or around London and travelled on the Continent: a summer spent in Switzerland near Byron (q.v.) was especially fruitful in fine poetry from Shelley and Byron, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), and Claire's daughter by Byron, Allegra (d 1822). Harriet Shelley committed suicide in Dec. 1816; Shelley immediately married Mary but was denied custody of Harriet's children on moral grounds. The Shelley household moved to Italy, where their two young children, Clara and William, died but a third, Percy Florence, was born in Nov. 1819. Shelley composed some of his best lyrics in Italy as well as The Masque of Anarchy (composed 1819 but published posthumously), Prometheus Unbound (1820), Adonais (1821), Epipsychidion (1821), and "A Defence of Poetry" (published 1839). With Byron and Hunt (qq.v.) he discussed starting a new journal, The Liberal. But Shelley died along with his friend Edward Williams in a sailing accident on 8 Jul. 1822. Their bodies were cremated on a beach near Viareggio in the presence of several witnesses including Byron and Edward John Trelawny--the latter of whom collected the ashes and had them interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome where Keats is also buried. Mary Shelley made an uneasy peace with the family at Field Place and took on the task of ensuring a lasting legacy for her husband with her annotated edition of his Poetical Works in four volumes in 1839. (ODNB 15 Sept. 2020)
Other Names:
- P. B. Shelley
- Percy B. Shelley
- Shelley