Summer in the Shadow of Byron

Description

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 Follow @amstott1789 on Twitter

* The Vampyre Family is a thrilling tale about the pursuit of love, sex and fame. Andrew McConnell Stott provides a dual portrait of the Romantic spirit during its most intense period of creativity, and uncovers the emotional devastation that was left in its wake -- AMANDA FOREMAN, the bestselling author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire Praise for The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: 'Brilliant ... As a portrait of London life in all its mutinous and anarchic variety this book would be hard to beat Spectator * A fast-paced rumbustious biography ... Stott evokes both the dizzying excitement and the harshness of theatrical life -- Jenny Uglow Observer * [A] great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life Guardian 'Book of the Week' * Stott's dynamic dramatization grabs our attention, and we, too, as outsiders [like Claire and Polidori], are cannily lured into the poetic celebrity's inner circle Times Literary Supplement