Valperga: The Life And Adventures Of Castruccio, Prince Of Lucca - Softcover

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

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9783849694876: Valperga: The Life And Adventures Of Castruccio, Prince Of Lucca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3849694879 ISBN 13: 9783849694876

Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag, 2015

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Valperga, published in 1823, the year after Percy Bysshe Shelley's death is a romance of the 14th century in Italy, during the height of the struggle between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, when each state and almost each town was at war with the other ; a condition of things which lends itself to romance. Mary Shelley's intimate acquaintance with Italy and Italians gives her the necessary knowledge to write on this subject. Her zealous Italian studies came to her aid, and her love of nature give life and vitality to the scene. Valperga, the ancestral castle home of Euthanasia, a Florentine lady of the Guelph faction, is most picturesquely described, on its ledge of projecting rock, overlooking the plain of Lucca; the dependent peasants around happy under the protection of their good Signora. That this beautiful and high-minded lady should be affianced to a Ghibelline leader is a natural combination ; but when her lover Castruccio, prince of Lucca, carries his political enthusiasm the length of making war on her native city of Florence, whose Republican greatness and love of art are happily described, Euthanasia cannot let love stand in the way of duty and gratitude to all those dearest to her ...............

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About the Author:

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), born in London, was the only child of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In her seventeenth year she eloped to the Continent with Shelley, and after living with him for two years, she was married to him when his first wife, Harriet, had committed suicide. In the summer of 1816 Byron, Shelley, and Mary were living on the banks of the Lake of Geneva; and the Shelleys often passed their evenings with Byron at his house at Diodati. Having during a week of rain amused themselves with reading German ghost-stories, they agreed to write something in imitation of them. Thus began Byron's tale of the Vampire, which Polidori, his physician, completed and published as his patron's. But the most memorable result of the story-telling compact was Mrs Shelley's romance of Frankenstein, recognised on its publication in 1817 as worthy of Godwin's daughter and Shelley's wife. After the death of her husband, Mrs Shelley— who was left with an only surviving son to inherit the baronetcy—returned to London, and devoted herself to literary pursuits, producing Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck, Lodore (1835; largely autobiographical), and other works of fiction, none of which merited the success of Frankenstein, though several of them contain admirable passages. Her last book was a record of her travels with her son in Italy and Germany. She was buried at Bournemouth.

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