Epipsychidion

Abstract

The winter of 1820–1 brought pleasures as well as pain: Epipsychidion was the outcome of an exciting new friendship. At the end of November, Shelley, Mary and Clare had been introduced to a beautiful 19-year-old Italian girl, Teresa Viviani. Teresa, or Emilia as the Shelleys came to call her, was a budding poetess, and her new friends duly admired her fluent verses and eloquent Essay on Love. Her father was a State dignitary — governor of Pisa and head of one of the four provinces of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany — but this did not prevent him being mean with money. For three years he had ‘imprisoned’ Emilia in a convent school, and there she was to remain until he could find a husband who would take her without a dowry.

[She] seemed not to be the child of a mortal man, but of a god.

Iliad