Melanie Rehak and Andrew Stott will discuss Stott’s new book, The Vampyre and the Poet: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters. Lord Byron spent the summer of 1816 in the Swiss countryside with his friends John Polidori, Percy ­Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Claire Clairmont. Stott recounts how, at Byron’s suggestion that the group trade ghost stories, Mary Shelley and Polidori created two of literature’s most revered monsters: Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the predecessor of Bram Sto­ker’s Dracula.

BBC news has reported the discovery of a small cache of previously unknown letters by Mary Shelley. The find came while Professor Nora Crook of Anglia Ruskin University was researching the holdings of a public records office in Essex, UK. The discovery of the letters, addressed to Horace Smith and his daughter Eliza, was quite by accident, according to Crook. The full article is available here.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive will have its public launch at the New York Public Library on Halloween, Thursday 31 October, 2013, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the Margaret Berger Forum, Room 227. Neil Fraistat and David Brookshire from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will describe the creation of the Archive's first transcribed and encoded manuscript, the Bodleian Library's Frankenstein notebooks of Mary Shelley. Liz Denlinger of the Pforzheimer Collection will give a brief overview of the Archive's generation and birth. Charles Robinson of the University of Delaware will give a more extended talk on the composition of the novel, with illustrations from the Archive.