The biography of a soul

This is a book that really ought not to work. Being Shelley is not quite a biography and not quite a critical reader and not quite anything most people will have seen before. If you want to know, in order, what happened in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley — where he went, who he met, what he did — you’d be best off looking elsewhere. If you’re an undergraduate looking for a line-by-line interpretive guide to his canon, likewise this is not your book.Yet I think Being Shelley will grow to be indispensible to anyone writing or thinking about the poet from now on — a vital companion to the two more conventional volumes that it isn’t.

Marrying a poetic style to a scholarly seriousness, Ann Wroe is, as she puts it, attempting ‘to write the life of a poet from the inside out’. The imaginative sympathy that we ask the literary critic to extend to the work, she extends to the life — or, at least, the inner life.