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Morgan, Jude : PASSION

Headline Review, 2005

ISBN 9780755304035

The attempted suicide of Mary Wollstonecraft opens this carefully researche d, deeply imagined and gorgeously written novel about the Romantic poets, a s seen by the women who loved them: Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary Sh elley, who fell scandalously in love with then-married Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein at age 19; the passionate but untethered Lady Carol ine Lamb, who never got over her love for Lord Byron; charming Fanny Brawne , devoted to her consumptive fiancé, Keats; and Augusta Leigh, half-sister to Byron, notorious for her incestuous affair with him. Dense, empathetic, detailed portraits of each woman lift them above their iconography; even By ron, in all his famous charm, is convincingly rendered. The poets, of cours e, are doomed--Byron, fighting in the Greek war of independence, dies of fe ver; Shelley perishes in a boating accident; and Keats succumbs to consumpt ion. Morgan concludes with a series of carefully crafted plateaus that evoc atively capture the women in varied states of acceptance, ambivalence and l onging after their losses. Augusta, whose appealing calm and optimism is al l the more paradoxical in light of her taboo-shattering decision to sleep w ith her half-brother, Byron, makes for a particularly fascinating character study. Mary Shelley, clear-eyed, solemn and terribly intelligent, also eme rges as three-dimensional and compelling. Morgan (The King's Touch) brings a fascinating past to brilliant light., Fine