In search of a creative community

While I'm editing my novel, I find it helpful to read something entirely unrelated. Young Romantics by Daisy Hay, subtitled The Shelleys, Byron and other tangled lives (Bloomsbury 2011), tells the story of a group of radical English writers over a period of a dozen years in the early nineteenth century. 

The book is both scholarly and deeply engaging at a human level. It would be worth reading if only for the story of Mary Shelley. Mary, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the anti-establishment novelist William Godwin, had an unusually progressive upbringing.  She was only sixteen when she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley but was already capable of holding her own intellectually.  

The story of how she came to write Frankenstein has become a literary legend – the small gathering of friends in a villa on Lake Geneva and the persistent stormy weather that prompted a writing competition. It is certainly remarkable to think of Mary Shelley, in her late teens, writing this classic Gothic novel and practically inventing the genre of science fiction. For the Shelleys and Byron and others of their friends, however, the circumstances were not unusual. Intense philosophical and political debates often directly inspired them to write poems, stories and essays, and they were used to engaging in competitive writing. Shelley came up with his most famous sonnet, "Ozymandias", in response to a challenge of this kind.  

Their motivation was not simply aesthetic. A key member of this circle, the writer and editor Leigh Hunt, had spent two years in prison for criticising the Prince Regent in his radical journal, The Examiner. Shelley had been sent down from Oxford for writing an atheist pamphlet. In their imaginative works, in response to a corrupt political establishment that used laws of libel and blasphemy to silence dissent, they expressed their opposition sometimes explicitly, sometimes by offering visions of alternative ways of living.

Friendship, as they practised it, was itself an expression of political resistance: free conversation among equals was a paramount value; and the women, though some of them paid a heavier price than the men for their unconventional lifestyle, were able to earn equal status through their intellectual abilities. In some ways this group was modelling the idea of a modern university at a time when formal academic study was available only to the conformist few and women were automatically excluded.    

Byron and Percy Shelley were both aristocrats with inherited wealth. Others, including Leigh Hunt and William Godwin, struggled to earn a living from their writing. Driven by artistic ambition and moved by the poverty they saw around them, they all chose to live more precariously than they might have done, sometimes at considerable cost to their physical and mental health. 

It's impossible not to admire their talent, productivity and courage. As a writer, I also respond to the impulse that drew them together in search of stimulation, sympathetic criticism and mutual support.  

Joe Treasure is the author of two novels: "The Male Gaze" and "Besotted".