Nobody could say Death sneaked up on Shelley. It did not come in disguise or by stealth but in as noisy and obvious a form as it could. It came as a squalling thunderstorm, with a blackened sky split by lightning. It was the kind of storm so often, and so predictably, cradled on such a coast, bred from the furnace heat of Mediterranean summer days. Nature has her patterns and the storm, that closed the sweltering afternoon of July 8th 1822, followed a pattern familiar to all Ligurians. Or Floridians, come to that. It was all over in much less than an hour.
In 1822, Shelley took a summer’s lease on the Casa Magni, a less than comfortable villa in the Gulf of Spezzia, a day’s journey down from Genoa. Byron had a majestic villa a few miles up the coast; the sea washed up to the door of Shelley’s. The view, however, Mary Shelley described as being of almost unimaginable beauty and so Shelley, Mary, their two-year son Percy Florence, and Mary’s half-sister Claire (who was the mother of Byron’s daughter), took residence.
Shelley intended to pass the summer sailing his newly built yacht Ariel (at first he’d called it Don Juan, but now he was out of love with all things Byronic). Yet for all the time he had spent floating around on rivers and lakes, Shelley had picked up no great understanding of boats and sailing. For him to be afloat was to be separated from the banal and the mundane, and untethered from the tragedies that tagged his youthful life.
By July Shelley was dead and, with him, two companions. Or, really, three. The poetic age of the heroic imagination – of the true Romantic – died with him.
Julian Roach studied English at Oxford and then became a television scriptwriter. He lives in Shrewsbury.
Reviews
Praise for the hardback:
'Roach has a great depth of knowledge, but isn’t hidebound by it. He doesn’t fall into the trap of championing either Shelley or Mary, but creates a complex picture of their relationship and their mutual flaws.' (Independent)
'This brief biography is…a heady and mood saturated portrait of a man who was a social thinker as much as a poet, and whose death as well as life has helped inform our retrospective perspective of the Romantic age.' (Metro)
