. . . . .

And:

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Not enough much help with and.

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Spring 2007, English 380F
MWF 3rd Hour, Franco

The Shelley Circle:
a story of Mr. and Mrs. Shelley

Kicked out of Oxford for advocating Humean atheism?
Married to a dull-witted prudish woman who refuses the free love advances of your best friend and who requires you to live with her tyrannical sister? Estranged from your inheritance and disowned by your father for stupidly eloping with the second Harriet you’ve ever loved?

But then along comes Mary.

“There can be no doubt that Shelley was entirely swept off his feet by the sudden vision of the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft: physical passion, brotherly affinity, spiritual identity burst upon him like a thunderclap. After the … naggings of unsatisfactory fatherhood and the tramels of the disappointed inheritance, it was as if he could start his youth all over again, a dazzling second chance. Mary offered fresh, 16-year-old sexuality combined in the most extraordinary way with the precocious intellectual flair of her Godwinian upbringing. She was both naïve and knowing, both flesh and spirit, burning with a youth and intelligence which blazed out all the more hypnotically against the gloomy, hopeless, complicated collapse of Shelley’s married relationship with Harriet. With only momentary hesitations and misgivings, he fled from the shadow into the sun. Love was free, and to promise for ever to love the same woman was absurd.” —Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit

WE’LL READ THEM BOTH—LETTERS, JOURNALS, LITERARY WORKS, ACCOUNTS BY FRIENDS, BIOGRAPHIES—SIDE BY SIDE.

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