author
Edward John Trelawny
1792–1881
A real-life adventurer as well as a writer, this vivid chronicler of the Romantic age moved through shipboard danger, political unrest, and literary legend. He is best remembered for the firsthand books that helped shape how later readers imagined Shelley and Byron.
3 Audiobooks
Un Cadet de Famille, v. 1/3
by Edward John Trelawny
Un Cadet de Famille, v. 3/3
by Edward John Trelawny
Un Cadet de Famille, v. 2/3
by Edward John Trelawny
About the author
Born in London in 1792, Edward John Trelawny built a reputation that was part fact, part self-invention. He went to sea while young, later turned his experiences into writing, and became known for a bold, restless style of life that matched the dramatic tone of his stories.
Trelawny is most closely linked with the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. In Italy he became part of their circle, and after Shelley's death in 1822 he played a striking role in the recovery and cremation of the poet's body. He also later joined Byron in Greece during the Greek struggle for independence, deepening his connection to one of the great literary legends of the 19th century.
His best-known books include Adventures of a Younger Son, a novel drawing on his seafaring past, and later memoirs about Shelley and Byron. Those works helped preserve intimate, dramatic portraits of both poets, even as readers and scholars have long noted that Trelawny liked to shape his own myth as boldly as he shaped theirs. He died in 1881.