Shelley (Annotated)

By: John Addington Symonds

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This is a new edition of “Shelley,” originally published in 1909 by Macmillan And Co., Limited, in London. Part of the project Immortal Literature Series of classic literature, this is a new edition of the classic work published in 1909—not a facsimile reprint. Obvious typographical errors have been carefully corrected and the entire text has been reset and redesigned by Pen House Editions to enhance readability, while respecting the original edition. The eBook edition was designed in an elegant style and set to take full advantage of the readers' features. “Shelley” is the biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the greatest contributors to the romantic poetry in the English language, and author of “Prometheus Unbound” and many other poems. Best known for his lyric poems such as “Ode to the West wind” and “To a Skylark;” for his fourteen-line, iambic pentameter sonnet “Ozymandias,” and for his treatise on atheism, “The Necessity of Atheism,” the tract which led to his expulsion from Oxford University when he was only nineteen years old. Percy Bysshe Shelley was married to Mary Shelley (née Godwin), the author of the successful novel “Frankenstein,” one of the most frequently adapted works of the 19th century. About the Author: John Addington Symonds was born in Bristol, England, in 1840. He was an English poet, an author of several works, and a literary critic. In 1873 he wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics, which discussed homosexuality between men. He printed ten copies in 1883, before effectively publishing the book in 1901. He was also known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as for his translations and biographies. He wrote Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (1891), biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1878), Philip Sidney (1886), Ben Jonson (1886) and Michelangelo (1893), several volumes of poetry and essays, and a translation of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1887). John Addington Symonds died in Rome in 1893. In 1896, Havelock Ellis published, in German—prepared with the collaboration of Dr. Hans Kurella—Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl (Leipzig, by Georg H. Wigand's Verlag), later revised and published by Ellis as Sexual Inversion—the first medical text in English about homosexuality, which he had co-authored with Symonds, and which would become a part of Ellis’s six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex.