The Text of Shelley's Death

Poetry. Fiction. Cross Genre. Who hasn't heard the story of Percy Bysshe Shelley's death? Yet, despite its infamy, there is hardly a detail in any of the tellings and retellings of the story of his drowning which does not contradict, directly or silently, a detail in another. THE TEXT OF SHELLEY'S DEATH collates these variant tellings using the techniques of the scholarly variorum. It is a kaleidoscope of voices: of Shelley himself, of Mary Shelley, Edward and Jane Williams, Byron, Trelawny, Roberts, Hunt, the Tuscan authorities, the spy Torelli, and of the later biographers and embellishers. "It's that rarest of things, a contribution to scholarship . . . which is at the same time a genuine work of art, with two lives: a Romantic, fragmentary, Shelleyan confusion, and a deconstructed, wry, Halseyan sympathy"-Paul Merchant.