8vo. li, [1], 351pp, [1]. Original publisher's navy cloth, printed paper lettering-piece to spine. Lightly rubbed, lettering-piece chipped. Internally clean and crisp. William St. Clair's copy, with his pencilled ownership inscription to recto of FFEP and inked and pencilled notes to rear endpapers.

The first trade edition of the collected correspondence of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) to his confidant, Sussex schoolteacher Elizabeth Hitchener (1782-1822). Shelley wrote to Hitchener frequently during summer of 1811 on a wide range of subjects from philanthropy to religious philosophy. After some time, realising that his letters might have given the wrong impression, Shelley felt compelled to announce to Hitchener his impending marriage to Harriet Westbrook. Many who were aware of Hitchener’s correspondence with Shelley, suspecting that she was his mistress, though there is no proof that this was the case. Later, Hitchener closed her school in order to join the Shelley family only to be shunned; Shelley's initial interest in her having waned.

William St. Clair (1937-2021), British scholar and senior civil servant, notable as the author of The Godwins and the Shelleys, The Biography of a Family (1989) and The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004).