Attending Oxford: Valperga!

The Oxford University Press, centuries old and the biggest academic press in the world, founded its World’s Classics series in 1906 (having bought the imprimatur lock, stock, and barrel from the brilliant publisher Grant Richards in 1901). For over a hundred years, the line has produced reasonably-priced and expertly-edited canonical texts, proving that great and challenging books never go out of fashion and paving the path for later imitators like the Modern Library and Penguin Classics. New or old, it’s always a pleasure to celebrate Oxford World’s Classics here at Stevereads.

Michael Rossington, in his erudite Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics of Mary Shelley’s 1823 historical novel Valperga, does himself and his readers a great favor by not calling the book a forgotten work of genius. He can see as well as any of those readers the enormous elephant in the room, an elephant in this case stitched together from the corpses of other elephants: of course it’s Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, which caught the zeitgeist in a vise grip from which it has never subsequently been released. It’s usually not given to any author to catch that zeitgeist more than once in their career (only the true zealot could name any of the novels that really pleased Bram Stoker or Arthur Conan Doyle), and it only happened once to Mary Shelley. Immortality is the ultimate lucky break of genius, and the immortality of Frankenstein was obvious almost immediately – most acutely obvious to Mary’s husband Percy, who teased her that her new novel Valperga was “raked out of fifty old books.”

It’s the fictionalized story of Castruccio Castracanti, a fourteenth-century Ghibelline soldier, captain, and prince of Luca who led his forces against the Guelphs, and it complicates his tale with the lives of two remarkable women: Euthanasia, the Countess who rules the fictional Guelph territory of Vaperga, and passionate heretic Beatrice. And although these three figures (each one a fairly easily identified stand-in for someone in Mary Shelley’s life, most especially Euthanasia) dominate the action of the novel, there’s so much more going on in Valperga than emotional blackguarding: much like Salammbo  and particularly Romola (and of course the novels of Walter Scott, who started the whole business), Valperga works hard to harness its vast researches for the purpose of generating the atmosphere of a different age. The characters speak with immediate dramatic honesty (unlike, for instance, almost everybody in Frankenstein), and the incredibly tangled politics of the day are made beautifully, irrationally intelligible. As far as historical fiction goes, the book is a stunning success.

It wasn’t a stunning success with the buying public, although the few book critics who took it seriously mostly esteemed it. Rossington touches with tantalizing brevity on this critical reception, preferring instead to dwell on the fact that Mary and Percy Shelley sent the very long original manuscript to Mary’s father William Godwin for editorial revision; at the time Godwin was desperate for ready money and hoped to sell the book at an advantage – which might have been one of the reasons he cut its length so drastically. Mary Shelley objected to none of these drastic cuts and edits; it’s clear that despite all the work she put into her research, she was prepared to hold the finished book at emotional arm’s length, referring to it at one point as “another landing place in the staircase I am climbing.” Percy Shelley was his usual smug, condescending self about the whole huge manuscript, and forever afterward there’s been the same sort of suspicion attached to Valperga that often still attaches to Frankenstein: just how much of either book is the work of the famous poet rather than his wife? “There is indisputable evidence that both Shelley and, to a greater extent, William Godwin were involved in the shaping of Valperga in its final form,” Rossington writes. “In the case of Shelley, his remark to Peacock, ‘I promise myself success from it’ seems curiously proprietary.”

Curiously proprietary indeed. And yet, the proof is in the reading. Just listen to a scene in which Beatrice seeks the aid of an old witch:

‘Consult your own heart, prophetess; and that will teach you far more than I can. Does it not contain strange secrets known only to yourself? Have you never owned a power, which dwelt within you, and you felt your own mind distinct from it, as it were more wise than you; so wise that you confessed, but could not comprehend its wisdom? Has it not revealed to you that, which without its aid you never could have known? Have you not seen this other self?’

‘Stop, wonderful woman, if you would not madden me,’ screamed the poor terrified Beatrice. ‘That is the key, the unbreakable link of my existence; that dream must either place me above humanity, or destroy me.’

‘You own this power?’ cried the witch triumphantly.

… and a dozen similar exchanges could easily be found, both in Valperga and Frankenstein; Percy Shelley never wrote anything like that in his entire life (one of the reasons his verse has gone to its long home in the mausoleum of schoolbook anthologies while the signature novel of his wife is so popular its title has become both a noun and a verb in the dictionary). The raw, ungainly passion of that “dream must either place me above humanity, or destroy me” is pure Mary Shelley, caught up in an agony of agency the like of which her husband never felt, though he often affected to.

Valperga, though so worthy of your time, is also destined for schoolroom trivia contests, which makes Oxford’s decision to publish this nifty popular edition such a happy one. Too much to hope that the press will take on Mary Shelley’s other ‘lost’ novels – Valperga and Frankenstein will have to be enough.