Beyond Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Italian Experience

Beyond Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Italian Experience, a talk by Dr Valentina Varinelli on Thursday 12 February at 5 pm

Guillermo del Toro’s recent critically acclaimed adaptation of Frankenstein has, yet again, brought Mary Shelley into the limelight. So, what better time than the present to explore the many other, less famous works of this eclectic writer? This talk will do so from the particular angle of Mary Shelley’s Italian experience – or, rather, experiences. We will begin by reconstructing Mary Shelley’s encounter with Italy, its inhabitants, and their culture and language at the time of her residence in the country with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, when she was in her early twenties. Looking at her fictional and non-fictional works as well as her journals and letters of the period, we will highlight analogies and differences between Shelley’s and Mary’s response to Italy. We will then compare this first experience with Mary Shelley’s reflections and considerations as she revisited Italy about twenty years later, on two separate tours of the Continent, as a middle-aged widow with a grown-up son.

Admission is free but booking is required due to the limited number of spaces (please write to info@keats-shelley-house.org).

Entry from 4:45 pm onwards. 

The event will also be streamed via Zoom. If you'd like to attend online, please send us an email and we'll share the link with you.

Dr Valentina Varinelli is a Research Fellow in English Literature at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Brescia, Italy. She is the assistant editor of the Mondadori Meridiani editions of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry and prose (2018) and the author of a monograph, Italian Impromptus: A Study of P.B. Shelley’s Writings in Italian with an Annotated Edition (2022). She has published articles and essays on the Shelleys, Byron, and their circles. Currently, she is co-editing Shelley’s Complete Verse Translations and Milton’s Complete Shorter Poems for the Longman Annotated English Poets series and editing the Italian Lives for The Oxford Complete Works of Mary Shelley.