Collaboration and Creative Sharing in the Pisan Circle
Ilaria Natali (University of Florence)
After learning of Percy Shelley’s tragic death, a grief-stricken Leigh Hunt wrote that “All things were one betwixt us,” their books “mingled together like our thoughts & love” (qtd. in Roe 2005: 348). The remark captures both the intensity of their affection and the extent to which their intellectual lives had become intertwined. Indeed, in the early 1820s, the Pisan Circle – particularly Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron – cultivated a fusion of friendship and intellectual commitment based on collaborative study and literary work. Although The Liberal (1822–23) was probably their most explicitly collective undertaking, many other works from this period were shaped through the group’s exchanges in Pisa and beyond.
The Circle’s significance lies not only in the writings that it produced but also in the milieu it created, one that blurred the boundaries between individual authorship, joint inquiry, and dialogic modes of composition in pursuit of broader ideological and cultural aims. Recent manuscript-based research has reconstructed this network with far greater precision than earlier biographical accounts had permitted. What emerges is the portrait of a coterie whose members worked in close proximity, exchanged manuscripts, revised one another’s texts, and circulated stories, sources, and fragments in ways that challenge the myth of the solitary Romantic genius (see Stillinger 1991: 6-7).
The Pisan ethos was by no means an isolated phenomenon within the Romantic period. The partnership behind Lyrical Ballads (1798), bringing together Wordsworth and Coleridge, already points to a broader pattern, as does Dorothy Wordsworth’s unacknowledged influence on her brother’s poetry (Newlyn 2013). Numerous other instances from the early nineteenth century reinforce this picture: Mary Berry and Joanna Baillie’s now largely forgotten practice of “companionate authorship” (Culley 2017: 73-98), Mary and Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807), initially attributed to Charles alone (Harvey 2016); and the activist writing of Susanna Watts and Elizabeth Heyrick in the 1820s, which challenged not only slavery but also the gendered constraints of public discourse (James and Shuttleworth 2017). Taken together, these examples reveal a literary culture more dependent on collaboration than the rhetoric of individual originality might suggest – and simultaneously they show how readily women’s contributions could be effaced or minimised. As Burwick notes, the ‘spirit’ of the Romantic period may coalesce within small, participatory circles, where ideas gain force through shared discourse (Burwick 2019: 4).
At the centre of the Pisan network were the Shelleys, whose co-creation has only recently been recognised as a fully reciprocal literary relationship. Their manuscripts demonstrate that joint writing was not a by-product of intimacy but a compositional method, evident from the outset of their partnership in 1814, when they began keeping common journals and notebooks. Percy would draft passages that Mary subsequently edited; Mary’s prose frequently retains traces of Percy’s interlinear suggestions; and their notebooks record sequences of commentary that reveal a thoroughly dialogic relationship. Their writing process constituted a “two-way exchange and collaboration” (Mercer 2019) evident in the interwoven handwriting and the shared physical spaces of composition. Such reciprocity also appears in August 1820, when Percy prefaced The Witch of Atlas with a sardonic apology to his Mary, “critic-bitten,” who apparently disapproved of the lines’ “visionary” character (Poetical Works 1839: 3).
The Pisan period intensified this interplay. Percy and Mary Shelley not only continued their routine of writing in shared notebooks: their work now intersected with Hunt and Byron’s literary and political agendas, especially in the planning and early composition of The Liberal. Mary’s drafts sometimes functioned as instruments of collective creativity, as she assembled Italian legends, anecdotes, and other narrative traces from the past and circulated them among the group’s members (Natali 2024: 35-57). Research into Italian texts, together with their transcription and translation, was integral to their literary production: it supplied the raw material for new poetic, dramatic, and prose works while also providing a common vocabulary on which each writer could draw.
In short, the Pisan circle practised a form of social creativity in which authorship was dispersed across multiple contributors rather than anchored in a single originating voice. The fragmentation, provisionality, and open-ended nature of drafts can thus be read as elements of a cooperative system in which each participant anticipated further intervention by others. Members of the group became one another’s immediate audience, critic, and interlocutor, generating a continuous exchange that left marked conceptual traces on their work. For instance, Julian and Maddalo, written shortly before the Shelleys’ move to Pisa, appears to have taken shape from the conversation Percy had with Byron in Venice in August 1818, reimagining it as a philosophical dialogue that stages both a meeting of minds and a productive tension between Julian’s reformist optimism and Maddalo’s cultivated cynicism (Pite 2000: 658).
Byron also drew Mary Shelley into his own compositional processes (see Cochran 1996). On one of such occasions, between mid-1822 and May 1823, she prepared the fair copy of Don Juan (Cantos VI–VIII), undertaking this editorial/scribal role with notable independence: she left blanks rather than transcribe passages she found objectionable, and her fair copies included small adjustments often softening his most provocative phrasing. Byron, for his part, proved receptive to such interventions; the surviving manuscripts show that he sometimes retained her modifications, allowing her editorial voice to remain embedded in the poem (McGann 1986: xxi-xxii). This evidence points to a relationship grounded in trust, even if it was not untouched by moments of hesitation about the workings of the Pisan circle: on 9 October 1822 Byron wrote of The Liberal, “I am afraid the Journal is a bad business, and won’t do; but in it I am sacrificing myself for others – I can have no advantage in it” (1901: 122).
Leigh Hunt’s role in this network, too, involved far more than the mediation of texts for his periodicals: he was an adviser who showed a constant desire to be involved in the Shelleys’ activities, as shown in July 1819, when he wrote to Mary in Leghorn to request “an opportunity of speaking about your writings” (Hunt 1862: 133). Mary later reflected on this dynamic in an 1838 letter, when Hunt offered to supply notes to Percy’s Posthumous Poems (1824) alongside her own: she acknowledged the creative sociability that had shaped their careers, conceding that “in works of imagination two minds may add zest and vivacity” (Letters II 305).
Mary’s comment gestures towards a collaborative ethos that is unmistakably present in Posthumous Poems as a whole. Her editorial work for this book was shaped both by the philosophical sympathies that she had shared with Percy and by her intimate knowledge of his compositional habits. Rather than acting as a custodian of his legacy, she drew on the co-authorial practices that had structured their literary partnership, allowing them to inflect her reconstruction of the poems, her attention to variants, and her handling of politically sensitive material. In this sense, the volume bears the imprint of methods refined within the Pisan circle, practices that continued to shape the textual afterlives of its members even after the group had dispersed.
The creative procedures of the Pisan circle forged a collective identity that transcended the specific contributions of any single member. This identity reveals the partiality of viewing Percy Shelley and Lord Byron as solitary visionaries, Mary Shelley as a merely supportive presence, and Leigh Hunt as a peripheral editor. Instead, the group exemplifies a distinctive Romantic model of collaboration that resists traditional notions of authorship. Through the sharing of manuscripts, reciprocal editing, the collective appropriation of sources, and the continuous exchange of ideas, the Pisan circle established a literary mode that was at once socially embedded and intellectually generative. What emerges from the manuscript evidence is a dynamic collective, united by political commitments, emotional bonds, and a sustained belief in the communal nature of artistic creation.
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Ultimo aggiornamento
23.01.2026