Ghostly Tales from the Lost Summer of 1816 - Frankenstein, The Vampyre & Other Stories from the Villa Diodati

Lord Byron, John William Polidori, Mary Shelley

Description

On a stormy summer in 1816, a group of pioneering writers gathered in a mansion on Lake Geneva and wrote some of English literature's most influential horror and ghost stories. This is a collection of their work.

Featuring stories of mutilated monsters being brought to life and sinister vampires roaming among the circles of society’s elite, this collection of dark tales from the infamous Lost Summer of 1816 has had a profound influence on the world of horror writing. Written over 200 years ago when Lord Byron rented the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, these stories by n William Polidori, poet Percy Shelley, and Shelley’s 19-year-old mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, are the result of a writing competition between friends. The most notable tale, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, would go on to become one of the most famous horror stories of all time.

This collection includes:

- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

- The Vampyre by John Polidori

- Fragment of a Ghost Story by Percy Shelley

- A Fragment of a Novel by Lord Byron

This volume of classic horror tales would make for a worthy addition to the shelves of fans of the horrifying and macabre, and also includes specially-commissioned biographies of each of the authors.

- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

- The Vampyre by John Polidori

- Fragment of a Ghost Story by Percy Shelley

- A Fragment of a Novel by Lord Byron

Sujets

• Fantastique
• Romance fantastique
• Bit-Lit
• Horror
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 14 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781528768672
• Langue: English

Extrait

GHOSTLY TALES
FROM THE LOST SUMMER OF 1816

FRANKENSTEIN, THE VAMPYRE OTHER STORIES FROM THE VILLA DIODATI
By
JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLY
LORD BYRON
Copyright 2019 Fantasy and Horror Classics
This edition is published by Fantasy and Horror Classics, an imprint of Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
www.readandcobooks.co.uk
CONTENTS

John William Polidori
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lord Byron
Extract of a Letter From Geneva
The Vampyre
Frankenstein
Fragment of a Ghost Story
A Fragment of a Novel
J OHN W ILLIAM P 1OLIDORI

John William Polidori was born in London, England in 1795. In 1810, he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on sleepwalking and graduated as a doctor of medicine. In 1816, Polidori entered Lord Byron s service as his personal physician, accompanying him through Europe and keeping a diary of their travels.
While at Byron s villa beside Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, they were joined by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. Storms and tumultuous weather confined them to the indoors, where they and Byron s assorted other guests took to reading to each other from a book of ghost stories. One evening, Byron challenged all his guests to write one themselves. The guests obliged, and Polidori wrote The Vampyre .
After parting ways with Byron, he travelled through Italy before returning to England, and in April of 1819, his story The Vampyre was published in New Monthly Magazine . The story is now seen as a progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction, and the first modern vampire story ever published in English. Suffering from depression and gambling debts, Polidori died two years after its appearance, possibly via suicide, aged just 25.
M ARY W OLLSTONECRAFT S HELLEY

Mary Shelley (n e Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) was born in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She came from rich literary heritage; her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1812, when she was just fifteen, Mary met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley was married at the time, but the two spent the summer of 1814 travelling around Europe together. In 1815, Mary gave birth prematurely to a girl, and the infant died twelve days later. In her journal of March 19, 1815, Mary recorded a nightmare she d had, now cited as a possible inspiration for her future masterwork, Frankenstein : Dream that my little baby came to life again - that it had only been cold that we rubbed it before the fire it lived.
In the summer of 1816, the couple famously visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva, in Switzerland. Storms and tumultuous weather (common in Shelley s future novel) confined them to the indoors, where they and Byron s assorted other guests took to reading to each other from a book of ghost stories. One evening, Byron challenged all his guests to write one themselves. The guests obliged, and Mary s story went on to become Frankenstein . Mary and Percy married later that year, and eighteen months later, in 1818 Frankenstein was published. Mary was only 21, and the novel was a huge success. The first edition of the book included a preface from Percy, and many, disbelieving that a young woman could have penned such a horror story, thought that the novel was his.
In 1819, following the death of another child, Mary suffered a nervous breakdown. This was compounded three years later when her husband drowned. Widowed at just 25, Mary returned to England, determined to continue profiting from her writing in order to support her one surviving son. Between 1827 and 1840, she was busy as an author and editor, penning three more novels and a number of short stories. However, she never experienced further success of the sort that Frankenstein had brought. Her final decade was blighted by illness, and throughout the 1840s she suffered from terrible headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body. In 1851, at Chester Square, she died at the age of fifty-three from what her physician suspected was a brain tumour.
Shelley underwent a period of critical neglect after her death, due in part to the onset of the realist movement. For a long time she was chiefly remembered as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and it was not until 1989 that a full-length scholarly biography was published. In recent decades, the republication of almost all her writing, including her short fiction, has stimulated a new recognition of its value, and scholars now consider Mary Shelley to be a major figure in Romanticism.
P ERCY B YSSHE S HELLEY

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in Horsham, Sussex, England in 1792. He studied at University College, Oxford, but his atheistic views got him expelled. Estranged from his father, he left home and began to take trips to London to spend time with famous journalist William Godwin. It was here, around the time that he published Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813), that Shelley met the Godwin s daughter, Mary, quickly striking up a romantic relationship with her. In 1814, the two of them eloped to Switzerland, where they spent time with Lord Byron, and where the young Mary Shelley found the inspiration for her future masterpiece, Frankenstein (1818).
In 1815, the Shelleys moved back to London, where the two of them continued to write. Percy was a prolific producer of literature, and many of the verse works he penned in the last seven or eight years of his life - such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy - are now considered some of the best in the English language. He was also known for his uncompromising idealism, most notably as a fierce advocate of non-violence and vegetarianism. Shelley spent the latter part of life in Italy, where he drowned during a sailing trip in 1822, aged just 29. It wasn t until after his passing that he developed a large following, and since his death writers as varied as George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Karl Marx have all expressed their admiration for him.
L ORD B YRON

George Gordon Byron was born in London, England in 1788. His mother was abandoned by her husband when Byron was two years old, and she took her son to Aberdeen, where they lived in considerable poverty for some years. Byron had a club foot, and was taunted in school, turning to writing at a young age to cope with this bullying. In 1798, aged just ten, he inherited the estates of his great uncle, Lord Byron, and moved with his mother first to the ruinous Newstead Abbey, then to nearby Nottingham. He started his education a year later, eventually enrolling at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Byron published his first poetic work, Fugitive Pieces (1806), at the age of just eighteen. Three years later, he began his Grand Tour of Europe (at that time a traditional trip undertaken by mainly upper-class young men of means) in the company of John Cam Hobhouse. Byron visited most of the Mediterranean, as well as Constantinople and what was then believed to be the site of the ancient city of Troy. He returned to England in 1811, publishing his exotic travelogue Childe Harold s Pilgrimage a year later. The work was an instant success, the first edition selling out in three days.
Over the next few years, Byron continued to publish a number of verse narratives, including The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and The Prisoner of Chillon . In 1816, he separated from his wife of just one year, with the cause supposedly relating to her revelation to her nursery governess that Byron had practised sodomy on her. In the same year, aged 28, he left England, never to return.
Byron visited Switzerland, staying at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where he composed the third canto of Childe Harold , and where Percy Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley and her half-sister Claire Clairmont visited him during the summer. Later that year, he moved to Venice, where he began a now-notorious lifestyle of debauchery with numerous local women. In the summer of 1818, he completed the first section of what would become his magnum opus, Don Juan . His publishers in England insisted it would never get printed, but he persisted. In 1819, Byron married again, this time to an Italian Countess, and became involved in the Italian struggle against Austrian rule.
In 1821, Byron published the poetic dramas Marino Faliero Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari , and Cain . He also completed Don Juan - his most famous work, and now considered one of the most important long poems published in England since John Milton s Paradise Lost . In 1823, Byron - a lifelong supporter of national liberation, and opponent of colonialism - was contracted by the London Greek Committee to aid the Greeks with their War of Independence from the Turks. Arriving in Cephalonia, an island off the mainland of Greece, he spent 4000 (about 200,000 in modern terms) of his own funds to enable part of the Greek fleet to relieve the town of Missolonghi, before becoming commander of a planned attack on the Turkish held fort at Lepanto. However, Byron died in April of that year (1826), following a series of fevers and fits. He was just 36 years old.
During his lifetime, Byron was celebrated for his excesses - huge debts, constant travel, numerous love affairs, opium use, and self-imposed exile. The Byronic hero - an idealistic but flawed character in possession of both passionate talent and a self-destructive nature - is now a fixture of Western literature. Byron is now regarded as one of the greatest British poets; in Greece, he remains a national hero.
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