Valperga

Not reprinted since its first edition, Mary Shelley`s second novel is
sure to be a major discovery of the Mary Shelley bicentenary of 1997.
The novel`s lack of success as a follow-up to Frankenstein was the
result of its subject matter and unconventional approach to the genre
of historical fiction, attributes that can only delight the
twentieth-century reader. Shelley`s mastery of the intricate details of
thirteenth-century Tuscan politics is unique among women of her time,
and her resolute filtering of the bloody heroics of the age through the
sensibilities of two women who are destroyed by them reveals the
feminist perspective missing so conspicuously from her first novel. The
latest addition to the acclaimed Women Writers in English series, this
glittering novel from Romanticism`s premier woman storyteller belongs
on the shelves of all serious readers of English fiction.