Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1792-1822
English lyric poet and writer, a leading figure in the Romantic movement

He was born in Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, and educated at Syon House Academy and Eton. He attended University College, Oxford, but was expelled for his contribution to a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. He met and eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, causing a further rift with his family that was never repaired. He lived for the next three years in York, in the Lake District where he met Robert Southey, in Dublin, and at Lynmouth in Devon where he set up a commune. At this time he wrote Queen Mab (1813), but it made little impact. He moved to London, and there fell in love with Mary (see Mary Shelley), the 16-year-old daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. They eloped in 1814, accompanied by her half-sister, Jane 'Claire' Clairmont, and were married after Harriet drowned herself in 1816. Meanwhile Shelley wrote an unfinished novella, The Assassins (1814) and published Alastor (1816). His son William was born in 1816, and he spent time with Byron at Lake Geneva. In 1818 he published The Revolt of Islam, and in the same year finally left England for Italy, where he was to spend the rest of his life. In 1819 came the major part of Prometheus Unbound, generally considered his masterpiece. The death of his son William in Rome devastated him and he moved to Tuscany, finally settling in Pisa. For the next few months he experienced a burst of creative energy which resulted in the completion of the fourth part of Prometheus, The Masque of Anarchy (1819), inspired by the Peterloo massacre, 'The Ode to the West Wind', 'To Liberty' and 'To Naples', 'To A Skylark', 'The Cloud', the intimate Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820) and The Witch of Atlas. These were followed by a series of prose pieces, A Philosophical View of Reform (1820), Essay on the Devil (1821), The Defence of Poetry (1821) and Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820), a burlesque, Adonais (1821), an elegy on the death of Keats, and Epipsychidion (1821), the fruit of a platonic affair with a beautiful Italian heiress held in a convent. Hellas (1822), a verse drama inspired by the Greek war of independence, was his last work. Returning from a visit to Byron and Leigh Hunt at Livorno in August 1822, Shelley and his companions were drowned in a sudden squall. His body was cremated at Viareggio and his ashes taken to Rome.

Bibliography: K N Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (1974) and Young Shelley (1951); R Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (1974); N I White, Shelley (rev edn, 1972).