Poetry. Fiction. Cross Genre. Who hasn't heard the story of Percy Bysshe Shelley's death? Yet, despite its infamy, there is hardly a detail in any of the tellings and retellings of the story of his drowning which does not contradict, directly or silently, a detail in another. THE TEXT OF SHELLEY'S DEATH collates these variant tellings using the techniques of the scholarly variorum. It is a kaleidoscope of voices: of Shelley himself, of Mary Shelley, Edward and Jane Williams, Byron, Trelawny, Roberts, Hunt, the Tuscan authorities, the spy Torelli, and of the later biographers and embellishers. "It's that rarest of things, a contribution to scholarship . . . which is at the same time a genuine work of art, with two lives: a Romantic, fragmentary, Shelleyan confusion, and a deconstructed, wry, Halseyan sympathy"-Paul Merchant.

Author City: Sheffield ENG

Alan Halsey was born in London in 1949, earned a philosophy degree, London, 1972, and ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye 1979-97. He lived in Sheffield since 1997, working as a specialist bookseller and publishing West House Books. He married Geraldine Monk in 1998.