Valperga: or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca

Overview

Not reprinted since its first edition, Mary Shelley's second novel is sure to be a major discovery of the Mary Shelley bicentenary of 1997. The novel's lack of success as a follow-up to Frankenstein was the result of its subject matter and unconventional approach to the genre of historical fiction, attributes that can only delight the twentieth-century reader. Shelley's mastery of the intricate details of thirteenth-century Tuscan politics is unique among women of her time, and her resolute filtering of the bloody heroics of the age through the sensibilities of two women who are destroyed by them reveals the feminist perspective missing so conspicuously from her first novel. The latest addition to the acclaimed Women Writers in English series, this glittering novel from Romanticism's premier woman storyteller belongs on the shelves of all serious readers of English fiction.

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Author Information

Bio of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

( 1797 AD - 1851 AD), English Romantic novelist, biographer and editor, best known as the author of Frankenstein. She was born in London. Her father, William Godwin was the writer and political journalist. She got educated amongst her father's intellectual circle, the critic Hazlitt, the essayist Lamb, the poet Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary authored many fine literary works. *** SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1797-1851), English writer, only daughter of William Godwin and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, and second wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, was born in London on the 30th of August 1797. When she was in Switzerland with Shelley and Byron in 1816 a proposal was made that various members of the party should write a romance or tale dealing with the supernatural. The result of this project was that Mrs Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Frankenstein, published in 1818, when Mrs Shelley was at the utmost twenty-one years old, is a very remarkable performance for so young and inexperienced a writer; its main idea is that of the formation and vitalization, by a deep student of the secrets of nature, of an adult man, who, entering the world thus under unnatural conditions, becomes the terror of his species, a half-involuntary criminal, and finally an outcast whose sole resource is self-immolation. This romance was followed by others: Valperga, or the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), an historical tale written with a good deal of spirit; The Last Man (1826), a fiction of the final agonies of human society owing to the universal spread of a pestilence; The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830); Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). Besides these novels there was the Journal of a Six Weeks' Tour which is published in conjunction with Shelley's prose-writings; and Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840-1842-1843 (which shows an observant spirit, capable of making some true forecasts of the future), and various miscellaneous writings. After the death of Shelley, for whom she had a deep and even enthusiastic affection, Mrs Shelley in the autumn of 1823 returned to London. In 1838 she edited Shelley's works, supplying the notes that throw such invaluable light on the subject. She died on the 21st of February 1851.

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Additional Info

Imprint

DIGIREADS.COM

Filesize

487.49 KB

Number of Pages

N/A

eBook ISBN

9781102302124