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  • Published: 15 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446414040
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

Being Shelley

The Poet's Search for Himself




A startlingly original new look at Shelley, a stunning work of scholarship and imagination by one of the most remarkable non-fiction writers in Britain.

Four questions consumed Shelley and coloured everything he wrote. Who, or what, was he? What was his purpose? Where had he come from? And where was he going? He sought the answers in order to free and empower not only himself, but the whole human race. His revolution would shatter the earth's illusions, shock men and women with new visions, find true Love and Liberty - and take everyone with him.

Ann Wroe's book takes the life of one of England's greatest poets and turns it inside out, bringing us the life of the poet rather than the man. The result is a journey that is as passionate and exhilarating as it is astonishing. This is Shelley as he has never been seen before.

  • Published: 15 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446414040
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

About the author

Ann Wroe

Ann Wroe is the Briefings and Obituaries editor of The Economist. She is the author of seven previous works of non-fiction, including Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Award and the W.H. Smith Award. She lives in north London.

Also by Ann Wroe

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Praise for Being Shelley

Being Shelley becomes a mirror of the poet himself - whimsical, various, subtle, and iridescent and evanescent. That is, no doubt, the book that Wroe proposed to write and she has succeeded

Peter Ackroyd, The Times

A wonderful achievement... At any single point the narrative is aware of the entire trajectory of Shelley's mind and career, so thorough is the assimilation of his intellect, imagination and emotional life. It succeeds wonderfully in getting inside what it was like to 'be' PBS'

Nicholas Roe

Amazing new book on the poet... Abandoning the usual conventions, she relates Shelley's life in an incomplete and non chronological way... It's a bold and risky concept and she pulls it off brilliantly... this really does convey the poet's mind and the excitement of reading the original ... Ann Wroe's wonderful, effortlessly eloquent book is like sharing a corner of his mind

Claire Harman, Evening Standard

Ann Wroe wanting to do Shelley's exasperating spirit justice, sets herself a challenge... She persuades us; we read Shelley with new eyes, freed of the gossip of conventional biography and academic doggedness... she reads process back into the work, occasions back into the poems. And she gives us what we need to read the work whole

Independent

Fascinating, experimental... A voyage into the mind that wrote the poetry and struggled with ideas, some mad, some sane, all interesting... As a history of how an unusual creative mind worked, it offers a new departure in the way biography is written

Lucasta Miller, Sunday Times

Her collage shimmers like reflections on water, trembles, dissolves and returns to form under the action of an invisible breeze or current... Wroe's emotional responses to her research are palpable

Sunday Herald

Indispensable... vital... startlingly good and original... Wroe is a writer of unusual excellence and a reader of exceptional sensitivity

Spectator

It is the closest thing to a masterclass with Shelley himself

Daily Telegraph

Singularly exhilarating

Richard Holmes, Guardian

Spellbinding... eye-opening... brilliant

Times Literary Supplement

There is biographical information in the book - a wondrous, copious flow of it

Independent on Sunday