My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m a big fan of Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley so I had to read their travelogue of two separate trips to Europe in 1814 and 1816. I was a little disappointed, mostly by their condescending remarks about the people they met in France, Germany, Switzerland and Holland. They also weren’t too happy with the towns and accommodations along their trip. It reminded me a little of Mary’s mother’s travelogue: Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

However, the descriptions of nature are striking, especially Percy’s thoughts in his second letter about Mont Blanc and the glaciers around Chamouni (called Chamonix today). Of Mont Blanc, he writes “Nature was the poet, whose harmony held our spirits more breathless than that of the divinest” (p. 152). And reflecting on a glacier, “there is an awful grace in the very colours which invest these wonderful shapes” (p. 155). I actually enjoyed Percy Shelley’s prose descriptions of nature more than his poem, Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni, which closed out this volume.