Reviews

In the age of Wordsworth and Byron, melancholy was rampant, and opium, a standard analgesic, was cheap, legal and widely available. It was a time when the new concept of romantic love defined women and men as free and equal partners. Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, escaping from her hopeless passion for married painter Henry Fuseli, fled to Paris and published Vindication of the Rights of Women. Some years later, her 16-year-old daughter Mary gadded about Europe with Shelley; Frankenstein would make her the most widely read romantic writer of her day. This delightfully impressionistic group portrait also includes French poet Andre Chenier, scribbling verse while awaiting the guillotine; German poet Friedrich Holderlin, smashing his piano and succumbing to madness; Byron exulting in casual sex amidst marital breakup; and E.T.A. Hoffmann who probed the theme of double identity in his marvelous tales. Christiansen is the author of Prima Donna, a book about famous opera divas. (June)

Straddling literary history and biography, Christiansen aims to understand Romanticism in terms of the individual human dramas that emerged from the personal and cultural turmoil surrounding the French Revolution and the age of Napoleon. Wordsworth, Byron, and the other major figures are thus read according to their personal relations and responses to their circumstances. Christiansen breaks no new ground, and he does not treat his material in great depth or detail, but his account is lucid, with a keen awareness of the narrative potential of his material. Further, he places the British Romantics in company with their European contemporaries from Chenier to Kleist and Pushkin. An engaging introduction to the Romantic era.T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.