Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author

Edward John Trelawny (1792-1881) was born into a well-established family from Cornwall. He passed a miserable childhood, and at the age of thirteen was enrolled by his father in the British navy. Discharged without a commission after a decade, Trelawny found his way to Italy, where he became part of the circle of expatriates around Byron and Shelley. He fought in the Greek War of Independence, during which he survived an assassination attempt, and wrote a notoriously unreliable but enormously successful autobiography, Adventures of a Younger Son, as well as his celebrated reminiscences of Shelley and Byron. Trelawny is buried beside Shelley in the English Cemetery in Rome. »

Anne Barton is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She is the author of Essays, Mainly Shakespearean. (March 2007) »

Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author

By Edward John Trelawny
Introduction by Anne Barton

In 1822, after having been discharged from the British navy, deserted by his wife, and as good as disowned by his father, the thirty-two year old Edward John Trelawny set off for Italy to make the acquaintance of his hero, Lord Byron. "I have met today the personification of my Corsair," Byron wrote in a letter. "He sleeps with the poem under his pillow, and all his past adventures and present manners aim at this personification." But though Byron enjoyed the company of his admirer, and was eventually to embark with him on his ill-fated final expedition to aid in the War of Greek Independence, he had grown guarded and ironical with age, and the perfect meeting of minds that Trelawny had envisioned was not to be. Shelley, however, enchanted him. In the months before his death at sea, he and Trelawny were frequent companions, and the young poet emerges from these pages in all his splendid carelessness and otherworldly concentration.

Read the introduction (PDF)

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Reviews

Your portrait of Shelley is full of truth—it is him in all his unaffectedness, in his simple tastes so fond of woods, seas, lakes, mountains; of birds and of music. There was in his manner of speaking, a touch of the woman, even of the girl . . . that appears most vividly in your description.
— Claire Clairmont, letter to Trelawny

In 'his' Byron and Shelley [Trelawny] created two figures that in their compelling solidity are fit to stand alongside any literary memoir short of Boswell's Johnson.
— David Crane, Lord Byron's Jackal

Also see:

The New Life
By Dante Alighieri
Translated from the Italian by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Preface by Michael Palmer

The New Life is the masterpiece of Dante's youth, an account of his love for Beatrice, the girl who was to become his lifelong muse, and of her tragic early death.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $18.95
Price: $14.21 (25% off)

May 31, 2000
308 pages
ISBN: 0940322366
9780940322363
Biography & Memoir
NYRB Classics
Poets & Poetry

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