Percy Bysshe Shelley: Exile of Unfulfilled Reknown, 1816-1822

This volume of Shelley's biography recounts his final years of greatest creativity and his often-painful emotional and romantic entanglements. Leaving Lord Byron in Switzerland, Shelley returned to England with Mary Godwin, their son, and Mary's ever-present stepsister, Claire Clairmont, pregnant with Byron's daughter. After his wife Harriet's shocking suicide, Shelley married Mary, who completed Frankenstein as he reluctantly revised his blasphemous epic of revolution and incest, Laon and Cythna. Legally deprived of his two children from his first marriage, Shelley felt ostracized for his radical political, social, and religious beliefs. Financial pressures, attacks by critics, and health concerns prompted Shelley's 1818 move to Italy.