Reviews

`E. B. Murray's new edition is important. There has never been a satisfactory scholarly edition of the prose ... Its editor has mastered the often frighteningly complicated printed and manuscript materials, and offers all of Shelley's known prose works in a reasoned chronological arrangement ... This new edition promises to be a landmark in Shelley scholarship ... meticulously researched and beautifully printed book.'
Times Literary Supplement
`This is the first volume of what will certainly be the definitive edition of Shelley's prose ... These commentaries synthesise a staggering body of published critical work and do the reader the courtesy of referring him or her to related primary and secondary materials ... More uncollected pieces are promised in this model of editorial scholarship.'
Durham University Journal
'the Oxford Poetical Works is as near to being truly 'definitive' as we are entitled to expect ... characteristically helpful commentary ... One of the richest general indexes I have read, compiled by Carol B. Pearson, rounds off this important resource for the study of Byronism and the Byron corpus. Those who have found the editor's annotation in past volumes sometimes rather underdeveloped will be pleased that on this occasion he has consistently
followed his own best standards of deftly combining hard information with suggestive critical insights. Comprehensiveness, is a legitimate scholarly goal, and the whole apparatus is so arranged that different
readers will easily be able to select the categories most useful to them ... the texts are handsomely printed in readable and accessible form and no route to understanding and further exploration is left unopened.'
Vincent Newey. Byron Journal '94
`No serious work on Shelley should be done without having the new Prose Works in hand...This first volume of Shelley's prose is, as one would come to expect from the Clarendon Press, excellently produced. Professor Murray has done a thoroughly excellent job in contextualising and presenting Shelley's prose. If Shelley turns in his grave with the arrival of this volume, it would only be to sit up and read, with reverence and wonder, his own respectfully
produced words.'
English Studies
`A complete and accurate edition of the prose has...been a desideratum which this first volume of the Oxford edition has begun to satisfy...No one is a more meticulous textual scholar than Professor Murray, and the fruits of his labours are here imparted to the reader...the present volume is...simply essential.'
RES New Series
`This is the first volume of what is likely to become the authoritative edition of Shelley's prose. What is new ... is the editorial scrupulousness and scholarly expertise with which these texts are presented ... this edition provides new information concerning the literary relations between Shelley and Mary Shelley ... This edition is not only essential reading for students of Shelley and his circle, but also a valuable resource for those interested in the
wider issues of textual transmission and literary authorship in the Romantic period.'
Pamela Clemit, University of Durham, Notes and Queries, June 1996