Young Romantics by Daisy Hay

(Bloomsbury, £20)

The tangled and tragic lives of Byron, Shelley, his wife Mary and most of those who got involved with them are well known — and at first I wondered whether there was anything new to say. But Daisy Hay argues that the Romantics wrote best when they were striking sparks off one another, and vividly describes a group of brilliant people born around the time of the French Revolution.

She begins in 1813, when the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt was imprisoned for libelling ‘Prinny’, the future George IV. Leigh Hunt is half-forgotten now, and had many faults, but he was the close friend and publisher of Keats and Shelley. And I had never heard of his wife’s sister, Elizabeth Kent, the author of a fine book of botany, Flora Domestica.

Of course, the women in this group always had to take second place to the men. Mary Shelley was treated quite badly by her husband and wrote nothing important after Frankenstein. Her stepsister Claire was treated with great brutality by Byron. Hunt was rather too deeply involved with his sister-in-law. At least two children died because their fathers were careless.

No wonder poor Claire Clairmont wrote in her old age that ‘under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love I saw the two first poets of England …. become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery’. They were definitely not men to get mixed up with, but their stories are fascinating.

* Daisy Hay will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on April 3 (www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com).

The Bodleian Library exhibition Shelley's Ghost, of family archives and relics, continues until March 27.