Shelley at Oxford
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, the eldest son of a baronet, though he never lived to inherit the title. He was, from the first, an exceptionally intelligent child, but he was clearly both disturbed and disturbing. Even when very young, Shelley was prey to fits of sleepwalking and strange waking visions of events…
‘Recalled to life’: Bleak House and The Man in Black
I’ve always thought that Bleak House is Dickens’ masterpiece – not just a vast panorama of contemporary London, from the highest to the lowest, but a rich compilation of literary genres from social commentary, to psychological drama, to mystery thriller. You can say something similar of most of his novels, of course, but in Bleak…
What if Byron and the Shelleys had live tweeted from the Villa Diodati?
It’s one of the most famous – indeed infamous – episodes in English literary history. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron took a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva. He was attended by his doctor, John William Polidori, and another nearby house was rented by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom…
Frankenstein: Mary, monster, myth
“When I placed my head upon the pillow, I did not sleep…. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me…. I saw – with shut eyes but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched…
My top ten fictional drownings, for The Guardian
I wrote this piece for The Guardian in 2013. You can read the article here https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/06/lynn-shepherd-top-10-fictional-drownings
Puffing Pamela: Book hype, 18th-century style
There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, or even – at a push – argue for Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, issued over a hundred years before, but one of…
‘Originally known as’: Famous books and their original titles
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but surely you should be able to judge it by its title? Titles are so definitive, so inseparable from a book’s very soul, that it’s hard to imagine any author leaving it to the last minute – or allowing someone else to decide for them…
A tweet universally acknowledged
Have you ever wondered what it would have been like if the Bennet girls had iPhones in their reticules and Mrs Bennet’s chatter was on Twitter? If Mr Collins was confined to 140 characters and Darcy could DM? I did, and here’s how I imagine the Netherfield ball playing on Twitter….
Bleak House, Dickens’ masterpiece
I’m sure I’m not the only Dickens fan who’s been both surprised and exhilarated to see how much interest has been generated by his bicentenary. Adaptations, exhibitions, new biographies, special events, and – last October – a poll in the Guardian newspaper asking readers to vote for their favourite novel. The winner, fairly comfortably, was Great Expectations, followed by Bleak…
It was a dark and stormy night: The strange story of ‘Shelley’s Ghost’
The episode that would later come to be referred to as ‘Shelley’s Ghost’ took place on 26th February 1813, in the midst of a raging storm, when the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was staying at a house called Tan-yr-allt, in Tremadoc on the coast of North Wales. What really happened that night remains a mystery,…
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa – one of the great masterpieces of European culture
‘O Richardson! In spite of ourselves we play a role in your works, we take part in your conversations, we approve, we blame, we marvel…’ Denis Diderot I’m with Diderot. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is, without doubt, one of the great masterpieces of European culture. An enormous claim, I admit, but I’m going to do my best…
‘Full fathom five the poet lies’: The death of Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died on 8th July 1822, at the age of 29, when his boat went down in a sudden storm off the coast of the Gulf of Spezia. A dreadful death, dreadfully young, but was it really just a tragic accident, or something far darker and more disturbing? Shelley and…
Jane Austen and the Gothic novel
It’s generally agreed that the first Gothic Novel was Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto of 1764. The first edition of the book claimed it was a translation of a 16th century document found in Naples, and only recently rediscovered in a house belonging to “an ancient Catholic family in the north of England”. Walpole did later admitted…
The Shock and Horror Picture Show: Étienne-Gaspard Robertson and the 19th-century phantasmagoria
The first time I had a sense of what a 19th-century phantasmagoria would really have been like was the Gothic Nightmares show at Tate Britain in 2006, which included not only Fuseli’s iconic Nightmare, but a special darkened room with a slide show projected on the walls, and suitably ghastly sound effects. That experience stayed with me, and when…
Even great writers get panned: One-star reviews for ten classic books
Everyone tells you not to do it, and yet you do it all the same. Taking a deep breath as you load the page, then scrolling down with mounting apprehension, and ending up – at least some of the time – wanting to sob/shout/shove the darn computer out of the nearest window (delete as appropriate).…
Regency ‘CSI’: Talking about thief takers
There were two big challenges in writing The Mansfield Park Murder, and they’re summed up in the title of the book. The first was creating an accurate and convincing version of Jane Austen’s own language and idiom, and the second (and in many ways the most fun) was producing an authentic Regency murder mystery. When I…
‘A Dickensian novel for the 21st century’
An interview for the Foyles blog in 2012, updated 2022 What are the challenges of writing a Dickensian novel for the 21st century? Interesting question! I suppose I would say that there are challenges that I chose not to take up, and challenges I couldn’t avoid. The most obvious example of the first was my…
Authenticity: The pleasures and perils of writing historical fiction
Authenticity. A word that, for a writer of historical fiction can be at one and the same time an inspiration, a labour (whether of love or hate), and the most enormous elephant trap. An inspiration, because if you’re anything like me, the more you learn about the past, the more fascinating it becomes, and the…
My five favourite fictional monsters
Frankenstein’s monsterMy book, The Frankenstein Monster, is inspired by the lives of the Shelleys – Percy and Mary – and includes my own version of that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816, when Frankenstein was conceived. So it’s no surprise that I’m choosing Frankenstein’s monster as the first on my list. We’ve all seen so many film…
Bringing the Shelleys back to life
The Frankenstein Monster is a fictional recreation of the lives of the Shelleys – the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned at the age of 29, and his wife Mary, author of Frankenstein. Anyone who resurrects real people in fiction faces some complex challenges, both technical and, if you like, ‘ethical’, but when your subjects are some…
The frame as a vehicle for symbol and significance
I wrote this piece for The Frame Blog. You can read it here
‘This fatal catastrophe’: The sad life and strange death of Harriet Shelley
Early in the morning of 10th December 1816 a man called John Levesley, a pensioner of the Chelsea Hospital, was making his way to Kensington across Hyde Park when he saw something floating in the waters of the Serpentine. It was the body of a young woman. It looked, he later told the inquest, as…
“The obscure parts of my own nature”: Did Percy Bysshe Shelley suffer from a personality disorder?
You don’t need to know very much about the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley to be aware that he was not just a poetic genius but a dark, tormented and turbulent young man. He left wreckage in his wake and (knowingly or not) caused immense pain to those around him, especially the women who loved…
Fictionalising 1816: The suicide of Fanny Imlay
The lives of the Shelleys are incredibly rich material for a novelist. There’s so much we simply don’t know. From what Richard Holmes calls the “two great biographical mysteries” of the assassination attempt in Tremadoc in 1813 and the Shelleys’ adoption and abandonment of a baby in Naples in 1819, to the relationship between Shelley and Claire…
Authors in the frame: ‘Reading’ novel frontispieces in the 18th century
I wrote this piece for The Frame Blog. You can read it here
Revisiting Dickens’ London
One thing everyone knows about Dickens – whether they’ve read him or not – is that he is London’s literary patron saint. Whole generations have grown up seeing Victorian London through his eyes, from the grime on the streets to the phoney glitter of the Veneering house in Our Mutual Friend, where everything is ‘in a…
Fictionalising 1816: The death of Harriet Shelley
The Shelleys and their circle have inspired hundreds of books, plays and films over the last two centuries, and there have been many accounts of that famous summer they spent together in 1816, when Frankenstein was conceived. But all the same there remain many inexplicable gaps and strange silences, where the biographers can offer us…
Jane Austen and the ‘father of the novel’
Jane Austen’s biographers often have to resort to guesswork and speculation about many aspects of her life, but there’s one thing we do know, and that’s who her favourite author was. According to her nephew, James-Edward Austen-Leigh, her knowledge of Samuel Richardson “was such as no one is likely again to acquire . . . Every…
Was Mary Shelley a feminist?
You’d think so, wouldn’t you. A woman whose father was a radical philosopher who believed in the equality of the sexes, and whose mother was a pioneering vindicator of women’s rights. How could the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin not be every inch the feminist her parents would have wanted her to be?…
The Devil is in the Detail, or How Not to Write a Regency Novel
If you decide to write a novel set in the Regency you have one real labour of love before you, and that’s to negotiate a veritable minefield of complex etiquette. There were so many rules governing social interaction – particularly between men and women – that it’s very easy to get the details wrong, and…
The haunting of Percy Bysshe Shelley
This fiend, whose ghastly presence everBeside thee like thy shadow hangs… Percy Bysshe Shelley was many things: a poet, a political radical and pamphleteer, a philosophical thinker, and a faithless husband. He was also – and this may come as a surprise – obsessed with the occult, and this fixation with spirits, demons, and dark…
A very ‘Romantic’ Rome: following the Shelleys’ travels in Italy
When I was asked to write a piece on places associated with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary, I was really rather spoilt for choice. Did I opt for Lake Geneva, where they spent that fateful summer with Byron and Frankenstein was born? Or the Ligurian coast, where Shelley drowned in a storm…
Dead poets’ notoriety: Fictionalising Byron and the Shelleys
‘Tis strange,—but true; for truth is always strange;Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,How much would novels gain by the exchange!How differently the world would men behold! Don Juan, Canto XIV Nowhere is truth stranger, in fact, than in aspects of Byron’s own life, not least that famous – or infamous – summer of…
Joseph Highmore’s ‘conversation piece’ of The Harlowe Family
Many editions of Clarissa have the Joseph Highmore painting on the front cover, and in this post I discuss the significance of the painting, and how it relates to the themes of family, kinship, power and control that the novel explores. Incidentally, for many years the painting was thought to be by William Hogarth, and was entitled simply…
Vampires and Victorians: Science and superstition in 19th-century London
When it comes to timing, I’ve had two fantastic strokes of luck as a novelist. The first was that I decided to bring my Dickens-related book, The Man in Black, to a close at the end of November 1850. Why was that lucky? Because it meant that when I chose to follow that novel with a…
Waking the (un)dead: Myths, monsters, and remaking a classic text
When I published what was then called Murder at Mansfield Park in 2010 I did an interview about it on BBC radio, and I remember the almost breathless awe in the interviewer’s voice as she said, “This is your first novel, and you’re trying to write like Jane Austen?” Amazing though it may sound, that was the…
Austen, Dickens and me: The art of literary ventriloquism
I’ve never much liked the word ‘pastiche’ . It always sounds rather condescending to me – as if the meticulous re-evocation of another’s style is some rather inferior form of passing-off. Personally, I prefer ‘literary ventriloquism’. The art of catching a recognisable and distinctive voice, just as Dickens describes young Sloppy doing in Our Mutual Friend,…
Jane Austen meets Agatha Christie
How Mansfield Park got a murderous makeoverAn isolated country house, a family that conceals its passions and rivalries under a veneer of upper-class civility, a charismatic outsider whose arrival brings these tensions into the open, and sparks a train of ultimately disastrous events. An archetypal Agatha Christie? Surely not Jane Austen? But in fact this is exactly the mise-en-scène at the…
‘The poet’s truth’: Or why it’s the big picture that matters in a Big Picture
This post was written just after the 2013 Oscar announcement Three of the films up for best picture in this year’s Oscars were re-creations of actual historical events, from the 19th century bio-epic Lincoln, to the tracking and capture of Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, to Ben Affleck’s Argo, which dramatized the plan to rescue six…
How do you solve a problem like Fanny Price?
“Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park” I doubt there’s another Austen heroine – even another Austen character – who’s inspired more discussion, disagreement and debate down the years than Fanny Price. There was a recent online debate on this very subject entitled ‘Fanny Price, love her or…
A profile of Charles Maddox, Victorian investigator
Let’s start with some backgroundIt’s 1850, and Charles Maddox is 25. As the book opens he’s living in a room in a lodging house near the British Museum with his cat, Thunder. As you look round his room you can tell that this is a young man with a scientific bent – the whole place…
My life in five books
I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. My parents tell me I taught myself at the age of three, and I think they must be right, because I can’t recall ever seeing letters as just incomprehensible squiggles of black ink. I lived half my childhood in a book after that, captivated by the…
Five literary greats and five great screen adaptations
When the nominations were announced for this year’s Oscars, one of the first things the media noticed was the number of nominees that were based on books. Eleven films shortlisted in the major award categories, and two-thirds of the Best Picture candidates were literary adaptations, including War Horse, The Descendants, and The Help. So with that in mind…
Following in Dickens’ footsteps
2012 is a year of Dickens anniversaries – a major one for him, and what’s turned out to be quite a significant one for me. It’s his bicentenary, of course, but it will also be 30 years since I first read Bleak House. I know that because I wrote an essay on it in my first…
How do you go about ‘ghosting’ Jane Austen?
Let’s start with the language I was writing The Mansfield Park Murder when The Duchess came out on film, and I heard it being reviewed on BBC Radio 4. The critic said she loved the authentic settings and costumes, but felt it was let down by the script – especially the reference to Georgiana offering to ‘make a deal’…
Jane Austen’s Hampshire
For this post I’m going to take you with me on a tour I did a couple of years ago of the beautiful part of England where Jane Austen lived as a girl. I’ve visited the ‘big’ Austen places like Chawton and Bath, and seen the house where she died in Winchester, but what I hadn’t…
The Gothic novel, then and now
One thing you can say about Gothic –whether you’re a reader or a writer – it’s the gift that keeps on giving – from Hammer to The Hunger to the seemingly endless series Frankenstein remakes. And of course we have the vampire vibe that refuses to die – not just Twilight and True Blood, but…
Brush up your Byron
Byron may have been mad, bad and dangerous to know, but how’s your knowledge of the rest of the Young Romantics? Are you a connoisseur of Keats, or a specialist on Shelley? Take this light-hearted quiz to find out how much you really know about this dazzling generation of English poets You can do the quiz…
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The Charles Maddox series 