Teddi Chichester Bonca. Shelley's Mirrors of Love: Narcissism, Sacrifice, and Sorority.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. xiv+311. $21.95 (paper)/$65.50 (cloth).

One of the commonplaces of biographically informed criticism of Percy Bysshe Shelley is that he spent his adult life trying to recreate the idyll of his Field Place childhood. As a boy, Shelley appears to have been the center and circumference of his sheltered world--surrounded by four adoring younger sisters with a beautiful mother presiding in the background. (A younger brother, John, was born when Shelley was fourteen.) The first cold blast of boarding school followed by more open confrontations with his family the broken engagement with his cousin Harriet Grove, expulsion from Oxford, elopement with Harriet Westbrook--eventually brought an end to this idyll. But it retained its pride of place in Shelley's imagination of what the real world ought to or even could become: a realm of nurturing sympathy, imaginative play, and sisterly love. One may well notice the not-so-hidden masculine bias of this idealized scene--a positive harem of oceanide-sister-cousins all in service to Prometheus Shelley--and Shelley himself came to have a certain insight into the narcissism that informed his visionary ideal. Shelley's Mirrors of Love: Narcissism, Sacrifice, and Sorority by Teddi Chichester Bonca offers a serious and nuanced analysis of this dynamic in his life and writing. It traces Shelley's sense of identification with a "sorority" increasingly linked to ideals of selflessness and "sacrifice" and his struggle with an underlying "narcissism" that at once interferes with those ideals and also, more subtly, expresses itself through them. Bonca focuses on the broken engagement with Harriet Grove as a particularly decisive moment in the unfolding of this psychic pattern. She presents it as crucial to understanding Shelley's lifelong fascination...

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