In the summer of 1816, during a very wet and miserable June, five people had gathered at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They were Lord Byron, his personal physician John William Polidori, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his future wife Mary Godwin (Shelley), and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont. Confined to the villa by the weather, the group took to reading fantastical stories, and then, inspired by their studies, took to writing their own. Compelled by this meeting, Mary Shelley would produce Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus two years later, and in 1819, John William Polidori published his short work of prose The Vampyre, sparking the beginning of the romantic vampire genre.
As it's Halloween, this week's blog will celebrate early Gothic fiction by looking at two of the best-loved masters of literary terror; Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. Their personal lives almost as romantic and tragic as the tales they created, Poe and Shelley have inspired generations of writers and horror fans alike, as well as become popular figures in modern culture through film, music and art. Carcanet have published Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven: Poems and Essays on Poetry as part of our Fyfield Books series, and Muriel Spark's critical essays on the life and works of Mary Shelley under the imprint Lives and Letters.
Here we've posted extracts from the books to whet your appetite - and - both titles are available to purchase from our website at a spooktacular 25% discount!*** So lock the door, close the curtains, light the candles, and settle into a dust-covered old armchair for a night of chilling and spine-tingling reading.
And if you're looking for something even more gruesome and horrifying, we suggest you watch the 2012 movie The Raven with John Cusack playing Poe himself, and the 2014 I, Frankenstein which sees Aaron Eckhart playing the creature two hundred years into the future who finds himself in the middle of a battle between gargoyles and demons and a villainous plot to create an army of soulless zombies or something....
We shudder at the very thought.
***This offer ends on 7th November.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and wearyOver many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.
- From The Raven: Poems and Essays on Poetry (Carcanet, 2012)
‘Methinks,’ wrote Byron to John Murray, ‘it is a wonderful work for a girl of nineteen, – not nineteen, indeed, at that time.’ But perhaps the wonder of it exists, not despite Mary’s youth but because of it. Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s best novel because at that age she was not yet well acquainted with her own mind. As her self-insight grew – and she was exceptionally introspective – so did her work suffer from causes the very opposite of her intention; and what very often mars herlater writing is its extreme explicitness. In Frankenstein, however, it is the implicit utterance which gives the theme its power.
It was not until 1831, when Mary revised Frankenstein, that she wrote her Introduction to it. (The book had previously appeared with a Preface by Shelley purporting to come from the author’s hand.) By this time Mary had reached a higher degree of consciousness, but even she, now, seemed aghast at the audacity of the work – her ‘hideous progeny’ as she called it; the question she asked herself, ‘How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?’ was one which many people had asked, and which she attempted to answer by giving an account of the circumstances of Frankenstein’s inception, naming the place, the people and the books which had influenced her. She took this task very seriously, and succeeded as far as (probably further than) any artist will, who tried to get at the root of his own work.
- From Mary Shelley by Muriel Spark (Carcanet, 2013)
John William Polidori's The Vampyre is also available on Kindle from Carcanet Press.
Happy Halloween!
