Mrs. Shelley.

ROSSETTI, Lucy Madox. [Mary Shelley].

$9,500.00

Item Number: 133425

London: W. H. Allen & Co, 1890.

First edition of Lucy Madox Rossetti’s biography of Mary Shelley; extra-illustrated and with an autograph letter signed by Mary Shelley laid in. Octavo, bound in full crushed levant morocco by Bayntun with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, quadruple gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, extra-illustrated with 77 engraved plates of portraits and views, 11 of which are hand-colored including a frontispiece portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley. With a fragment of an autograph letter signed and entirely in the hand of Mary Shelley laid in which reads in full, “…to this office, the publication being for the benefit of his Widow, who at an advanced age & in bad health, is left totally unprovided. Many of my father’s correspondents have kindly placed in my hands letters of his for the purpose of publication. I looked over the volumes of correspondence with the Revd. Dr. [Samuel] Parr, which you have published, & find that you have not… Will you be so good as to… me by an early answer. I am Yours Obediently Mary Shelley 4 Lowes Belgrave St. 23 Sep 1836.” After her father’s death in April 1836 at the age of 80, Mary began assembling his letters for a memoir for publication as he had requested in his will, but after two years of work she abandoned the project. The present letter was likely sent to a publisher before Shelley abandoned the project. From the library of renowned English bibliophile Edward Hailstone with his gilt morocco bookplate to the pastedown. In very good condition. An exceptional example of this rare work; highly desirable with a letter signed by Shelley.

English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley remains best-known for her gothic horror novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and is widely regarded as the first true science-fiction story. The circumstances of its composition are by now well known: 19-year old Mary was in Switzerland with Percy Shelley, Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori on that famous evening in 1816 when the discussion turned to one of Shelley's favorite topics, the supernatural. Byron proposed that all members of the party write a romance or tale dealing with the subject. The resulting efforts were Polidori's The Vampyre, Byron's unfinished narrative about a vampire, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, "the most famous English horror novel… a defining model of the Gothic mode of fiction, and… the first genuine science fiction novel, the first significant rendering of the relations between mankind and science through an image of mankind's dual nature appropriate to an age of science" (Clute and Nicholls, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1099).