Hints and tips:
...Dark afternoons of spirit-raising and ether-taking with their glamorous neighbour (Lord Byron) and his handsome doctor (John Polidori) led to storytelling....
...Mary and Percy meet Byron — played by Tom Sturridge as a broader version of Booth’s hale, ruby-lipped toff with a bardic talent — and Byron is in his Geneva palazzo, saying: “Things have been getting bloody...
...Across Europe, Mary and Percy consorted regularly with Lord Byron....
...and in her introduction to the revised, 1831 edition of her novel gives part of the credit for its inspiration to a discussion of the biological “principles of life” between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron...
...More recent is Daisy Hay’s compelling group biography: Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and other Tangled Lives (2010)....
...In reality, Mary Godwin, better known as Mary Shelley, and Byron’s daughter were of different generations....
...While holidaying in the Alps with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the young Mary Godwin was stranded indoors by unending rain....
...Andrew Motion pulled it off with his life of Philip Larkin (1993); Byron Rogers’ The Man who Went into the West (2006) presents the Welsh poet-priest R.S....
...There have been family biographies (the two-generational The Godwins and the Shelleys by William St Clair) and several books on the friendship between Byron and Shelley....
...Shelley, four years younger than Byron, twice eloped with girls of 16 – the second time with Mary Godwin, taking with them her half-sister, Jane Clairmont, to make up a ménage-à-trois....
...Lord Byron published the first cantos of Don Juan anonymously because he feared his satire might be used against him in a custody battle with his estranged wife....
...I like, though, the tiny glimpse of Byron and Shelley standing in the billiard room of Byron’s Venetian palazzo with the light of a “dim, grey day” coming through the windows....
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