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The Collation

Reading the romantics

What do Folger staff read in their spare time?  Not necessarily Shakespeare!  I’ve recently finished a wonderful book by Daisy Hay called The Young Romantics, published in the spring of 2010 and now available in hardback, paperback, or on a Kindle near you.  Hay has an amazing grasp of the lives of the second-generation Romantics—Shelley, Keats, Byron, Mary Shelley, her stepsister Claire Claremont, Leigh Hunt—and a host of others in their expanding circle.  Hay smoothly brings their stories to life in a riveting narrative that reads like fiction and includes incest, adultery, illegitimacy, imprisonment—except it’s all real!

Reading about these folks made me want to go back and see what’s at the Folger relating to the Romantics, and there’s much more than you might expect.