Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 820.9145 STO | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 820.9145 STO | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Love affairs, literary rivalries, and the supernatural collide in an inspired journey to Lake Geneva, where Byron, the Shelleys, and John Polidori come together to create literature's greatest monsters
In the spring of 1816, Lord Byron was the greatest poet of his generation and the most famous man in Britain, but his personal life was about to erupt. Fleeing his celebrity, notoriety, and debts, he sought refuge in Europe, taking his young doctor with him. As an inexperienced medic with literary aspirations of his own, Doctor John Polidori could not believe his luck.
That summer another literary star also arrived in Geneva. With Percy Bysshe Shelley came his lover, Mary, and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont. For the next three months, this party of young bohemians shared their lives, charged with sexual and artistic tensions. It was a period of extraordinary creativity: Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein , the gothic masterpiece of Romantic fiction; Byron completed Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , his epic poem; and Polidori would begin The Vampyre , the first great vampire novel.
It was also a time of remarkable drama and emotional turmoil. For Byron and the Shelleys, their stay by the lake would serve to immortalize them in the annals of literary history. But for Claire and Polidori, the Swiss sojourn would scar them forever.
Author Notes
Andrew McConnell Stott is the author of The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi , which won the Royal Society of Literature Prize, the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography, and was a Guardian Best Book of the Year. The Poet and the Vampyre is his first book to be published in America. In 2011, Stott was named a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is a Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, SUNY. Please visit his website at www.andrewmcconnellstott.com.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Stott's chronicle of Lord Byron and his circle concerns itself exhaustively with their itineraries and entanglements-less so with their literary works. In 1816, following the collapse of "Byromania" in the wake of his broken marriage, Byron crosses the Channel in the company of his physician, John Polidori. While abroad, the poet and the doctor encounter Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's wife-to-be, Mary Godwin, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont. The party lingers in picturesque spots, and readers learn of their erotic intrigues and the jostling of their Romantic egos; the momentous literary consequences of their European vacation, however, receive less consideration. The novels Frankenstein and The Vampyre, written by Mary Shelley and Polidori respectively, were prompted by the "ghost story contest" set by Byron one night in Geneva. Stott (The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi) observes this occasion and gives updates on the drafting processes and practicalities of publication (or, in Polidori's case, piracy), but his discussion of the novels themselves, which gave birth to "literature's greatest monsters," is cursory. Though the book successfully draws attention to two figures-Polidori and Clairmont-who have been overshadowed by their more illustrious companions, it can scarcely be described as literary scholarship. As a popular history, however, it's certainly engaging. 16 pages of color and b&w photos. Agent: Ben Mason, Fox Mason. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
It is 1816. Lord Byron, notorious after leaving his wife, Annabella Milbanke, flees England for the Continent with his valued personal physician John Polidori, himself unusually handsome and an aspiring writer. At the same time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, also on the verge of great fame; his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, journey to Geneva, Claire in youthfully obsessive pursuit of the romantic hero Byron. At this point, the narrative may as well be an account of modern rock stars. This is heady stuff, as full of radical philosophizing, wild eccentricity, free (and other) sex, intoxication, friendship, betrayal, suicide, uncertain paternity, and political intrigue as any celebrity bio or salacious novel. Polidori, after a break with Byron, went on to write the first vampire novel; Mary Shelley began work on the classic Frankenstein during that 1816 sojourn; Byron wrote Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and more; and Shelley pursued his short but illustrious poetic life. Some of this is plodding, but it is mostly fascinating reading even two centuries later.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TRADING GHOST STORIES before the fire has, reflexively, become the stuff of fiction. Creating one's own tales has not. In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron; his doctor, John Polidori; the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; and Shelley's lover, Mary Godwin, did just that, hatching, with improbable coincidence, "Frankenstein" and "The Vampyre," the slender precursor to Bram Stoker's "Dracula." Andrew McConnell Stott's "The Poet and the Vampyre" examines the fateful gathering's personalities, promise and perils. The company was nothing if not precocious. Byron, its host and guiding light, had shot to fame with the 1812 publication of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." He read, wrote, traveled and seduced prolifically, occupying the pinnacle of fashionable society until his marriage to Annabella Milbanke ended in scandal amid accusations of madness and sodomy. Dogged by rumor, he resolved to quit England for good in April 1816, pausing for several months to recover his health in Switzerland before settling in Venice. For the journey, he engaged the 20-year-old Polidori, freshly graduated from Edinburgh's prestigious medical school, where Charles Darwin would matriculate in 1825. On the other side, Shelley, expelled from Oxford for atheism, had eloped with the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, only to abandon her three years later for Mary, then 16. The latter was the daughter of the Jacobin novelist and philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," who didn't survive the birth. When Godwin remarried, his stepdaughter, Claire Clairmont, eight months younger than Mary, became her closest companion. What Claire lacked in polish she made up for in determination, setting her cap for Byron at age 17, pursuing him single-mindedly until they slept together one week shy of her 18th birthday. It was their affair that caused the group to meet at the Villa Diodati, the manor Byron rented on the southern shore of Lake Geneva. Holed up during one of the summer's many storms, they found that "the gloom turned their amusements ghostly." They read out ghoulish tales in French; Byron proposed they each write their own. According to Shelley's preface to the first edition of "Frankenstein," the two poets and Mary alone took part in the "playful desire of imitation." In reality, Polidori, who had keen literary ambitions, also tried his hand. Byron and Shelley gave up the exercise shortly thereafter. Mary carried on, completing "Frankenstein" the following year. So, too, did Polidori, crafting "The Vampyre" from the eight-page fragment Byron had discarded. Stott's narrative is fluid, informative and stylish, offering uncommon insight into Claire and Polidori, who were misguided and overmatched. Regrettably, Mary and the creative process itself receive shorter shrift. Given the summer's legacy, this is an unfortunate omission. Indeed, commercial interests notwithstanding, the book might more suitably be called "The Stepsister and the Physician." For the troubled strivers powerfully illustrate Stott's thesis. These "archetypes of grievance" were haunted forever after not by pallid monsters, but by the ruinous specter of fame. Polidori, who seems never to have met someone he couldn't antagonize, spent his remaining years in Byron's long shadow, spiraling into debt and despair. He died, almost certainly by his own hand, in 1821. He was 25. Claire lived into old age. Though Byron was willfully cold and indifferent until his own death in 1824, two years after their 5-year-old daughter, Allegra, succumbed to typhus, Claire continued to fixate on his image, her spinsterish hate burning as brightly as her girlish love. As Stott (a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo) concludes, the hapless pair "found that what they hoped would exalt them caused them only pain." Mary's infamous "creature" disabuses Dr. Frankenstein rather more succinctly: "You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!" MAXWELL CARTER, an M.B.A. candidate at Columbia Business School, writes frequently on the arts.
Choice Review
This book is, in part, a retelling of an oft-told story: that of the "haunted summer" of 1816 during which Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori spent time together in Geneva. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein and Polidori's story "The Vampyre" were products of the ghost-story writing competition that Byron proposed to the group. Stott (Univ. of Buffalo, SUNY) displays little interest in the writings of any of these men and women however and does not seem to have much of a thesis, other than the observation that Clairmont and Polidori sought to bask in the heat of Byron's celebrity and both got burned. Byron could be very cruel and self-centered, but in this book, he is forced into the role of a two-dimensional villain, often through evidence cherry-picked to put him in the worst possible light. Those with a scholarly interest in the lives and, especially, the works of these writers will find this book too superficial. The narrative, which mainly focuses on the pain Polidori and Clairmont endured by entangling themselves with Byron, may entertain (or more likely depress) more casual readers, but these readers will not be much enlightened. Summing Up: Optional. General readers only. --Jeffery William Vail, Boston University, College of General Studies
Kirkus Review
A literary history reveals the sorrows of the Romantics.Central to Romanticism was the cult of personality, the ideology of the creative genius and its attendant fascination with the lives of individuals. Among the most fascinating was Lord George Gordon Byron, who, by 1816, was the most famous poet in England, as much for the gossip he incited as for his sensuous poetry. As Stott (English/Univ. of Buffalo, SUNY;The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, 2009) argues in this impressive group biography, Byron assiduously created himself as a celebrity by generating rumors about his atheism and sexual appetites, and by appearing dressed as a monk or in flamboyant Albanian robes, hosting orgiastic parties in which wine was drunk from a carved skull. Women swooned over him, no one more persistently than Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley, who began her pursuit when she was 16. Claire, Mary and her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Byrons sometime friend and personal physician John Polidori make up the tragic cast of characters entangled with, and wounded by, the self-serving Byron. Despite this books sensational title, Stott focuses not on the creature in Mary ShelleysFrankensteinnorThe Vampyre, a tale by Polidori that Byron stole and published under his own name; the literary monsters who emerge from this story of selfishness and manipulation are Byron and Shelley. Although Byron deigned to sleep with Clairmont, he rejected her when she became pregnant, then insisted on sole custody of their daughter, refusing to allow Claire to see her. Shelleys abandoned wife, Harriet, killed herself at 21; Marys half sister Fanny killed herself, as well, unsettled by Mary and Percys elopement. Polidori, a victim of Byrons scorn and his own failed aspirations, committed suicide at the age of 25.As Stott reveals in this engrossing history, lust, greed and the unquenchable thirst for fame were forces of evil that imbued the age of Romanticism with grief. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Stott (English, director, Honors Coll., associate dean for undergraduate education, State Univ. of New York Univ. at Buffalo; The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi) explores several core manuscript collections to piece together the travels and travails of several early 19th-century authors and poets such as John William Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron as well as the myriad love interests that entered and exited their lives primarily between 1816 and 1822. Stott's examination of letters, manuscripts, and diaries reveals these authors and their pseudoattempts to live the dissenting cultural ideas of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Stott's Byron and Shelley are particularly complicated in that they claim to pursue freedom and free love, but they live off family money and their love interests are all tinged with pain. The narrative sheds light using Polidori's diary and a series of missives, as well as interviews collected by those who knew people around these writers. From these sources, readers get a perspective on the origin of the short story The Vampyre, supposedly written by Polidori during these years with Byron, Shelley, and Mary Shelley-even while the latter was crafting another icon of horror, Frankenstein. Stott's work deftly brings together aspects of the culture of poetic fame and the writing life of these renowned authors. VERDICT A dramatic literary history ideal for readers interested in Romantic-era writing as well as stories mixed with sensation.-Jesse A. Lambertson, Metamedia Management, LLC, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustration | p. xiii |
| Prelude | p. 1 |
| Chapter 1 St George's Day | p. 3 |
| Chapter 2 Directions for John | p. 20 |
| Chapter 3 The Footing of an Equal | p. 41 |
| Chapter 4 That Odd-headed Girl | p. 56 |
| Chapter 5 Here is a Man | p. 76 |
| Chapter 6 An Empire's Dust | p. 93 |
| Chapter 7 Young Tahitians | p. 110 |
| Chapter 8 A Star in the Halo of the Moon | p. 128 |
| Chapter 9 Fog of the Jura | p. 150 |
| Chapter 10 To Die of Joy | p. 168 |
| Chapter 11 The Hero of Milan | p. 186 |
| Chapter 12 Household Gods | p. 208 |
| Chapter 13 The Vampyre | p. 230 |
| Chapter 14 Sea Sodom | p. 251 |
| Chapter 15 Torn Clouds Before the Hurricane | p. 272 |
| Epilogue | p. 294 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 309 |
| Notes | p. 313 |
| Bibliography | p. 401 |
| Index | p. 417 |
