Shelley’s poetry, drama, and prose reveal his deep engagement with his own cultural epoch. Born in Horsham, Sussex to a wealthy family, he was the eldest child of Timothy Shelley (later Baronet in 1806), and was educated at Eton College. He published two Gothic novels in 1810, Zastrozzi and St. Irvine, and published and subsequently withdrew a collection of poetry, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, with his sister Elizabeth, and Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. In the same year, Shelley went up to University College, Oxford, and was expelled in 1811 for publishing The Necessity of Atheism with his friend and fellow student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. This was also the year he met and married Harriet Westbrook in Edinburgh when he was nineteen and she sixteen years old. The marriage and his expulsion from Oxford led his father to disown Shelley.
His political radicalism intensified, and, accompanied by Harriet, he went to Dublin and distributed copies of his political pamphlets on Catholic Emancipation and Irish political reform. On his return, he moved from Wales to Devon, and then back to Wales while composing Queen Mab. His first child, Ianthe, was born in 1813. However, Shelley’s marriage had become strained, and his meeting with William Godwin not only brought him into the sphere of a political and philosophical thinker he deeply admired, but also introduced him to Godwin’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Godwin, in 1814. Mary and Shelley fell in love, and the couple eloped. From 28 July they toured Europe accompanied by Claire Clairmont, Mary’s half‐sister, before returning to England on 13 September 1814. Mary and Shelley lost their first child (born on 22 February 1815), but their financial difficulties were alleviated by the death of Shelley’s grandfather and his father’s financial settlement with Shelley.
Their first son (William Shelley) was born on 24 January 1816. The summer of 1816 saw Shelley and Byron meet in Geneva. Also present were Claire Clairmont, who had begun a sexual liaison with Byron in England, and Mary Shelley (or Mary Godwin as she then was). Claire discovered that she was pregnant by Byron; Mary began to write Frankenstein; and both Shelley and Byron wrote poetry inspired, in part, by their intellectual connection. After his return to England, life was deeply traumatic. Fanny Godwin, Mary’s half‐sister, committed suicide, as did Harriet Shelley in late 1816. Shelley lost custody of both Ianthe and Charles, his children by Harriet. Mary and Shelley married a month after Harriet’s suicide, presumably so as to gain custody of the children. Their petition was overturned in March 1817, and in March 1818 they moved to Italy, for a complex set of personal, financial, and medical reasons.
If Italy initially improved Shelley’s health, it could not prevent further tragedies. He and Mary lost Clara when she was a year old in 1818 and William when he was three years old in 1819, and their marriage suffered as a result of their loss. However, Shelley’s work went from strength to strength, with 1819 often referred to as his annus mirabilis, when he wrote Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and The Mask of Anarchy, amongst others. His work was often critically neglected or poorly reviewed owing to his radically heterodox views and his friendship with Leigh Hunt, a notorious radical, but most reviewers recognized his poetic talent. In his elegy for John Keats, Adonais, which he referred to as ‘perhaps better in point of composition than any thing I have written’,1 Shelley commemorated the death of a literary peer whom he held in high esteem. Planning to start The Liberal with Leigh Hunt and Byron, Shelley died in 1822, just after Hunt had arrived in Italy. Returning from meeting Hunt in Pisa, Shelley drowned when his boat, the Don Juan, sank. He died with his friend Edward Williams and a deckhand, Charles Vivian. Shelley’s range of writing, encompassing poetry, philosophical and political prose, and novels and plays, attests to his radical and sympathetic world‐view; his work remains alert to reality even as it aspires to glimpses of some ‘unascended Heaven’ (Prometheus Unbound 3.3.204).
James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography, 2 vols; vol. 1, Youth’s Unextinguished Fire, 1792–1816 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004); vol. 2, Exile of Unfulfilled Reknown, 1816–1822 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill, ‘Introduction’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [2003]), pp. xi–xxiv; Michael O’Neill, ‘Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25312, accessed 9 September 2015]; Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25312.