Sherry Chandler » Who will someday write novels
Who will someday write novels
about Billy Collins and Dana Gioia?
Jude Morgan has novelized Byron, Keats, and Shelley in a tome entitled Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
A passage from the review by Yvonne Zipp, from Powell’s, originally in the Christian Science Monitor:
Instead of the head-on approach, Morgan instead explores the lives of four of the women who loved the poets (Byron, of course, gets more than his fair share): the high-strung Lady Caroline Lamb, who has an affair with Byron; sparkling Fanny Brawne, who was engaged to Keats before his untimely death; generous, sunny Augusta Leigh, half-sister and lover of Byron; and Mary Shelley, Percy’s teen bride and author of Frankenstein.
Morgan opens with the attempted suicide of Mary Wollstonecraft, protofeminist and author. And Wollstonecraft, with her radical idealism and defiance of society, serves as matriarch to all, not just her famous daughter. After Wollstonecraft dies as a result of childbirth, the novel catalogs the childhood of the four women.
Some readers may find the early pages slow (Bring on Bryon!), but the wealth of detail and Morgan’s amazing ability to re-create what these women might have thought and felt are worth savoring. The novel is meticulously researched, but scholarship never outweighs storytelling.
…
The men might have the fame, but they never quite come to life in the same way as the women, particularly Augusta and Mary. Shelley, despite his espousal of free love, somehow seems a prig. Byron and Keats get plenty of clever witticisms (a running gag has both men making fun of Wordsworth) but sometimes their genius feels stated rather than observed.
But these are minor quibbles. For lovers of literature, Passion more than lives up to its title.
Just in time for Christmas. Here is another review from The Guardian.
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