ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, XII, 9 May 1819, pp. 302–3. It was reprinted in Reiman, Part C, vol. i. p. 44. Rosalind and Helen was composed over various periods between 1816 and 1818, and completed while Shelley was resident in Italy. The manuscript was sent to England where it was published in the spring of 1819. The narrative of broken friendship between Rosalind and Helen, caused by revolutionary political idealism loosely reworks the painful history of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s (1797– 1851; DNB) severed relations with her childhood friend, Isabella Booth (née Baxter). Their break-up was forced by the latter’s husband, William Baxter, who disapproved of the Shelley’s radical lifestyle out of wedlock. In giving poetic form to this melancholy narrative, which features the bittersweet reunion of the two old friends after many travails, Shelley criticizes the social institution of marriage and espouses, through the character of Helen’s beloved Lionel, political views similar to the revolutionary principles of The Revolt of Islam (reviewed favourably in 1818 by Hunt; see headnote above, pp. 144–7). Hunt’s endorsement of the poem here continues the contrasts he had been developing only the previous week between the bigoted conservatism of the Wordsworth/Southey Lake School and the liberal politics of his own circle (see headnote above, p. 186). For the positioning of this essay within the overall political strategy of his reviewing practices at this time, see headnotes above, pp. 55–6, 81–4, 144–7. For his elaboration of these procedures in later reviews of Shelley during 1819–20, see below, pp. 214–21, 273–80).
