Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 and published his first volume of poetry in 1809. He was expelled from Oxford University for his distributing a pamphlet entitled “ The Necessity of Atheism. ” Four months later, he eloped with and married Harriet Westbrook but later left her for Mary Wollstonecraft, future author of Frankenstein. Shelley was working on his last major poem, “ The Triumph of Life, ” when he was drowned in Italy in 1822, aged twenty-nine.
Jack Donovan (editor) is a reader in English Literature at the University of York and co-editor of the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Shelley.
Cian Duffy (editor) is reader in English at St. Mary’ s University College, Twickenham. He co-edits the Longman Shelley, and is the author of Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime.
