André Maurois’s Ariel is a biographical portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley written with the movement and compression of a novel.

Maurois follows Shelley through a mixture of idealism, desire, friendship and self-dramatisation that shaped both his poetry and his private world. Harriet Westbrook, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and the crowded emotional arrangements around them appear not as background figures but as participants in the consequences of Shelley’s belief that life might be remade according to principle.

Originally written in French and first published in 1923, Ariel helped establish Maurois’s reputation for “fictionalised biography”: historically grounded but openly concerned with atmosphere, character and psychological pattern. Its method now feels dated in places, particularly where speculation acquires the confidence of fact, yet it remains an elegant and revealing example of early twentieth-century literary biography. For readers interested in Romanticism, Shelley, the literature of literary lives, and the dangerous interval between radical ideals and ordinary human obligations.

Penguin Books, 1985 facsimile reissue of the 1935 Penguin edition, published for Penguin’s fiftieth anniversary. Paperback. Light cover rubbing, edge wear and page toning, with a small mark to the lower front cover.