selenak

Allow me to geek out for a moment: Byron's copy of 'Frankenstein' with a handwritten dedication by Mary Shelley goes on sale at an auction! Haunted summer! One of the more creative laudanum-drenched get togethers of English writers while touring Switzerland! (Also a bad Highlander episode, but forget that one.) (The Ken Russell movie Gothic, otoh, is also historical nonsense but in Russell fashion outrageously entertaining nonsense. Have a look at the trailer. Anyway, the dedication is very formal - "Lord Byron", when later he's Albé (as a play on L.B.) - and I find it amusing and touching that nineteen-years-old Mary writes "from the author" instead of her name. She did publish anonymously at first, but this was a private inscription, not for the public eye, and yet. Her feelings about Byron were always mixed, never just dislike or sympathy but usually both at the same time, but either she wanted him to have a copy anyway or maybe he bought one and asked her for a dedication. (Byron mentions Frankenstein as a remarkable book in a letter to his publisher John Murray, in the larger context of denying writing The Vampyre which was by his only-for-a-short-while doctor John Polidori but also published anonymously at first and rumoured to be by Byron; Murray as Byron's publisher had an obvious interest in clearing up whether his author was cheating on him, so Byron went through the whole origin saga of the best horror fandom challenge fest ever at the Villa Diodati when Mary, Shelley and Mary's stepsister Claire dropped by.)

Moving to English writers some decades later, since two months ago I wrote some Bronte meta along similar lines, I was delighted today to discover this post on Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and Wuthering Heights.