Born in Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, Shelley was educated at Syon House Academy and Eton, where he acquired the sobriquet "Mad Shelley" for his independent spirit. While at Eton he published Zastrozzi (1810), a Gothic novel. Expelled from Oxford because he refused to retract his atheistic beliefs, Shelley quarreled with his wealthy father and was banished from home. Shelley married impulsively and then abandoned his young wife to run off to Italy with the 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (the daughter of the radical feminist and the anarchist philosopher, who was eventually to wr
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"Would Julia of Strobazzo's heart was reeking on my dagger!" From the asthmatic urgency of its opening abduction scene to the Satanic defiance of the villain's departure "with a wild convulsive laugh of exulting revenge", this first of Shelley's Gothic ... SEE MORE