"This volume of Shelley's biography recounts his final years of greatest creativity and his often-painful emotional and romantic entanglements. Leaving Lord Byron in Switzerland, Shelley returned to England with Mary Godwin, their son, and Mary's ever-present stepsister, Claire Clairmont, pregnant with Byron's daughter. After his wife Harriet's shocking suicide, Shelley married Mary, who completed Frankenstein as he reluctantly revised his blasphemous epic of revolution and incest, Laon and Cythna. Legally deprived of his two children from his first marriage, Shelley felt ostracized for his radical political, social, and religious beliefs. Financial pressures, attacks by critics, and health concerns prompted Shelley's 1818 move to Italy." "In this "Paradise of exiles," Shelley's creative genius reached its zenith. His amazing productivity included major poems, lyrics, extended prose works, and translations, all despite marital strain, depression, and hallucinatory episodes." Shelley found a retreat on the Bay of Lerici where, joined by his friends Edward and Jane Williams, he sailed his new boat and confided darkening thoughts to Edward Trelawny. Shelley's love lyrics to Jane, his last inamorata, were written as he composed his final great work, The Triumph of Life, broken off by his untimely drowning, a controversial sailing tragedy that is considered here in detail. Shelley's fascinating posthumous life is narrated in the subsequent intermingled lives of the poet's most intimate associates.