Maurois’ fictionalised Jazz Age biography of Shelley, translated from the French by short story writer and Yellow Book editor, Ella D’Arcy. One of the ‘romance biographies’ that followed the success of Stratchey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), Maurois (through D’Arcy) renders Shelley as ‘a demigod with flashing eyes, a shirt-collar open on a delicate throat, and hair as fine as spun silk,’ while his second wife, author of Frankenstein is ‘Mary of the nut-brown eyes […] slim and true as a Toledo blade’. Ariel went on to be the first title published by Penguin Books.