"In common with other young writers whose lives were linked with theirs, Shelley, Keats and Byron were indebted to an earlier trio of Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, whose work marked a striking break with the rational, of the early eighteenth century. This break had a profound effect on literary culture in the decades following the French Revolution. Unlike Blake, whose work remained largely unread for decades after his death, Wordsworth and Coleridge were famous in their own time. Contemporaries of both poets were startled by the distinctiveness of their work, and by the ."
Daisy Hay is Associate Professor in English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter and an author of non-fiction. Hay was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.
"As with all the best s, Hay makes her readers drag their feet towards the end, reluctant to part company with people she has made us know and feel for. Her book has turned the ’ uneven romance into a real love story. How pleased they would have been."
"In 1980 Earl Anderson published an article in on the history of foot races in which he characterised the old womens race in as a delightful instance. That view, thankfully, is not replicated elsewhere. Pioneering Burney scholars, including and Kristina Straub, have read the race as symbolic of a social system that dehumanises women and is a literalisation of male brutality."
"became a and a in an age when books appeared to have the potential to change the world. Between 1760 and 1809, the years of Johnsons adulthood, Britain experienced a during which nothing was certain and everything seemed possible. On paper charted the evolution of Britains relationship first with America and then with Europe: several were intimately involved in the struggles that reformed the ."
"Daisy Hay’s nuanced readings of Mary Shelley’s works, combined with photographs of manuscripts, books or physical artefacts from the collection, give readers a vivid picture of Mary Shelley’s time and how she translates life into art. As Hay in the concluding chapter argues, Frankenstein—as a productive, ethical and political metaphor—articulates the anxieties of an age inundated with , innovations and sudden changes."