Fiery Heart
  • Published: 1 March 2005
  • ISBN: 9780712602242
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $45.00
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Fiery Heart

The First Life of Leigh Hunt

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EBook
1 Nov 2010
Tr. Paperback
1 Mar 2005
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The first biography since 1930 of one of the most influential and charismatic figures in the political and cultural life of the 19th century.

Leigh Hunt is the forgotten giant of English Romanticism. The man Virginia Woolf called the 'spiritual grandfather' of the modern world was descended from black Caribbeans and grew up a child of the American and French revolutions. A poet and radical journalist, he threw off the shackles of the old order and campaigned tirelessly for Irish freedom and the abolition of slavery. Unwilling to see the Prince of Wales as an 'Adonis of Loveliness', Hunt was jailed for 'diabolical libel' that presented the prince as he was: a corpulent fifty-year-old, sodden with drink and drugs.

Hunt was the centre of a charismatic generation. In prison, he drew the homage of Lord Byron, and soon afterwards discovered the Romantic geniuses Keats and Shelley. He was also a man riven by contradicitons, enjoying a controversial public role while battling with private demons. Hunt's own poetry glows with the sexual frankness that characterised all his relationships, male and female.

Written with flair and brilliant imaginative insight, and using a wealth of unpublished manuscript sources, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt overturns existing accounts and presents a sparkling new portrait of Leigh Hunt and the English Romantics.
  • Published: 1 March 2005
  • ISBN: 9780712602242
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Nicholas Roe

Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at St Andrews University. He is the author of Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (1990), John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1998), The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (2002) and Fiery Heart a biography of Leigh Hunt.

Praise for Fiery Heart

Roe is an exceptionally shrewd critic of Romanticism - uncannily alert... everything he says is well-turned and reliably clever

Andrew Motion, Guardian

Roe provides as complete a portrait as we are likely to get of Hunt’s first 37 years

Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph

Roe offers a meticulous and thorough account of Hunt’s significance in the literary culture of the Regency era

Sunday Telegraph

Roe's biography is an absorbing account of English intellectual culture in the early 19th century

Evening Standard

Roe is a seasoned Romantic scholar who offers an impassioned account of Hunt's 'first life'

D J Taylor, Sunday Times

Excellent...intriguing reading...Surely [Leigh Hunt] should be back in print for us to judge him now

Daily Mail

Roe brings to his work decades of research on the period...[his] volume is free of imprecision and well-informed

Independent