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Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) set out to challenge theproprieties of his Victorian contemporaries in every way: from the explicitsexuality and blasphemy of his early poetry to his political radicalism andhis enthusiasms for such then uncanonical writers as Blake, Shelley and theElizabethan dramatists surrounding Shakespeare. This edition gives newdetails about virtually all his literary undertakings (including hispublishing income) and provides much new biographical information.For thefirst time too the texts of Swinburne's letters to and from his cousin MaryGordon Leith appear, letters often written in a transparent code and usingfictional personae that illuminate and intensify the curiously erotic, evenflagellatory, relationship that appears to have existed between them.AmongSwinburne's correspondents were such writers and artists as John Morley,Simeon Solomon, Lord Tennyson, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, theRossettis (Dante Gabriel, Christina, and William Michael) and William Morris.Other correspondents represented include Swinburne's companion TheodoreWatts-Dunton, his publisher Chatto and Windus, his mother, sisters, and aunt,and such friends as John Nichol and George Powell.The appearance of thesevolumes moves Swinburne studies a significant step forward. They will nodoubt stimulate even further the accelerating critical and scholarly interestin a notorious poet whose works even today are sometimes controversial enoughthat the editor, working in Virginia, needed permission from the state toquote and annotate some of Swinburne's poems and letters with excerpts fromhis unpublished erotica.