Valperga at 200

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces a cluster of three new essays on Mary Shelley’s 1823 novel Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, presented here on the bicentennial of the novel’s publication.

KEYWORDS:

• Valperga
• Mary Shelley
• historical novel
• Italy
• peace

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Mary Shelley, Valperga: Or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 132, 134. Subsequent citations from Valperga will be given parenthetically.

² Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 13 (1823), 284.

³ Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences no. 319 (Saturday, 1 March 1823), 133.

⁴ The Journals of Mary Shelley: Part I: 1814-July 1822, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

⁵ Stuart Curran, ‘Introduction,’ in Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), xxiii.

⁶ Leanne Maunu, ‘The Connecting Threads of War, Torture, and Pain in Valperga,’ European Romantic Review 21, no. 4 (2010), 447–68. Maunu here thoughtfully builds upon Betty T. Bennett’s observation that the ‘detestation of war and the concern for the abuse of power that one sees in her novels may well have been first inspired by their visit to Nogent’ (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 28).

⁷ Mary Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (London: Hookham and Ollier, 1817), 19.

⁸ William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 272.

⁹ Entry for 19 February 1823. The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

¹⁰ William Godwin to Mary Shelley, 15 November 1822. The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Julian Marshall, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley and son, 1889), II, 52.

¹¹ Literary Gazette, no. 319 (1 March 1823), 132.

¹² Monthly Review, no. 101 (May 1823), 105.

¹³ Mary Shelley to Charles Ollier [November-December, 1839]. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1980–88), II, 332.

¹⁴ Frankenstein; ou, Le Prométhée modern, trans. Jules Saladin (Paris: Corréard, 1821).

¹⁵ Valperga, ou, la Vie et les aventures de Castruccio Castracani, prince de Lucques, trans. Nicole Berry (Lausanne: Âge d’Homme, 1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Bugg

John Bugg is Professor of English at Fordham University, and author of British Romanticism and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2014), and editor of Wuthering Heights (Oxford World's Classics, 2020) and The Joseph Johnson Letterbook (Oxford University Press, 2016). His essays and reviews have appeared in PMLA, ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century Studies, TLS, Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Keats-Shelley Review, and Keats-Shelley Journal. He has held fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is co-founder, with Sarah Zimmerman, of the Fordham Romanticism Group.