Summer in the Shadow of Byron
Villa Diodati. 1816.
In a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and his young wife Mary, gathered for the summer. For three glittering months, this party of young bohemians would share their lives, charged with sexual and artistic tensions. It was a period of extraordinary creativity from which would emerge some of the masterworks of the Romantic period, including Frankenstein.
But there were two other guests at the villa that summer, for whom the season would not be so rosy. With Byron came his young physician, John Polidori, a man with literary aspirations of his own. And joining Mary was her step-sister, the beautiful Claire Clairmont. For Byron and the Shelleys, their stay by the lake would serve to immortalise them in the annals of literary history. But for Claire and Polidori, the Swiss sojourn would scar them forever.
Andrew McConnell Stott is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, a history of theatre and comedy told through the story of Britain's greatest pantomime clown, was published by Canongate in 2009 and won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, the Sheridan Morley Award for Theatre Biography, and the George Freedley Memorial Award. It was a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' and was named by the Guardian as one of its 'Books of the Year.'
www.andrewmcconnellstott.com
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