Focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley's stepsister and Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt's botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon and Joseph Severn; and writers such as Charles and...

In this chronicle of his lifelong obsession with discovering, assembling, and re-creating the lives of writers and scientists, Richard Holmes here casts a new eye not only on the Romantic poets and lost women of Romantic science he has long studied, including Margaret Cavendish and Mary Somerville, but on their biographers, as well. He examines the evolution of the myths that have overshadowed certain lives (Percy Shelley's death at sea, Mary Wollstonecraft's...