Shelley: The Life

About the lecture

In this module, we think about Shelley's early life and education, focusing in particular on: the political climate into which he was born; his experiences at both school and university; his first marriage; his correspondence with William Godwin and elopement with his daughter, Mary; their travels in Europe, including the famous trip to the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, which gave rise to 'Frankenstein'; his vegetarianism; and his varied literary output – including his political writings, plays, and poetry.

About the lecturer

Ross Wilson was born in Salford and brought up in north Manchester, where he attended Philips High School and Bury College. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and University College London before completing his doctorate at Cambridge in 2004. He held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel (2004-7) and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Faculty of English, Cambridge (2007-9) before being appointed to a lectureship in Literature in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2009. He returned to Cambridge in 2013 as Lecturer in Criticism in the Faculty of English and took up a fellowship at Trinity College. He is editor of Romantic Circles Reviews & Receptions and very occasionally tweets @RossWilso . In 2015-16 he is the Crausaz Wordsworth Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities.