Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford after publishing a pamphlet defending atheism and became known for radical political and religious views as well as for his poetry. His relationship with Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley, led them into a life of travel and controversy before they settled for extended periods in Italy.

In Italy Shelley moved within the expatriate literary circle that included Lord Byron and wrote major works such as Prometheus Unbound , Adonais and Ode to the West Wind . He drowned in 1822 when his sailing boat sank in the Gulf of La Spezia, leaving a body of work that became increasingly influential after his death.

William Boyd’s The Romantic brings Percy Bysshe Shelley into the European wanderings of its fictional nineteenth-century protagonist, Cashel Greville Ross. Cashel’s encounters with Shelley and Lord Byron place him briefly inside the expatriate world of Romantic writers in Italy, where literature, political idealism and unconventional personal lives overlap. Shelley functions as a historical landmark in a novel that uses one invented life to move through the century’s wars, travel, empire and intellectual change.