The Domestication of Genius Biography and the Romantic Poet

This book is about how biography first developed as a popular form, and how it shaped the reputations of the early nineteenth-century Romantic poets. It focuses on the first-published biographies of six major Romantic poets: Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon published from the 1820s, by Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, and others. Biography was an influential transmitter of the myth of 'the Romantic poet', asthe self-creating, masculine genius, but it also posed one of the first important challenges to that myth. By revealing their subjects' often scandalous domestic lives, biographers gave readers an intimate view of the private weaknesses of these writers - including failures in domestic responsibilitythat were often seen as indicative of their inattention to the needs of the reader. The Domestication of Geniusis the most comprehensive account to date of the shaping of the Romantic poets by biography in the nineteenth-century.

Julian North received her BA and D. Phil. from the University of Oxford. She is a lecturer in nineteenth-century English literature at the University of Leicester, having previously been a lecturer in the English Departments of the University of Reading and De Montfort University. She is the editor of volume 11 and co-editor of volume 20 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 volumes, General Editor, Grevel Lindop (Pickering and Chatto, 2000 -2003), and the author of De Quincey Reviewed: Thomas De Quincey's Critical Reception, 1821-1994 (Camden House/ Boydell and Brewer, 1997). She has also published on Romantic auto/biography, literary tourism, screen adaptations of the novels of Jane Austen, and nineteenth-century opium literature.

Introduction1. Biography and Domestic Life2. Biography and the Romantic Poet3. The iLives/i of Byron4. Biography and the Shelleys5. De Quincey and the Lake Poets6. The Female Poet. The AfteriLives/i of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon