Romantics and Incest

[kitsune13]

Was reading James Twitchell's Forbidden Partners, which is about incest in literature and culture. A great deal of space is devoted to the Romantic poets who (overtly or covertly) discussed incest, both of the parent-child kind (which, then as now, was universally conceived of as wrong), and sibling (which was more problematic) -- Byron and Wordsworth being the most famous. Anyway, Percy Bysshe Shelley was exceptionally devoted to his sister Elizabeth (they collaborated on Shelley's first book of poems), and they were rumored to be sexually involved; his work Laon and Cyntha openly portrays a romantic relationship between a brother and sister, which the poet does not condemn them for, although Shelley's readers saw it differently -- it was very widely banned, and only a few copies managed to slip into circulation.

There's a Percy/Ginny (Ginny --> Virginia --> Virgin Queen --> Elizabeth) fic in there somewhere.