Mary Shelley, Valperga. Ed. Stuart Curran. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-19-5108817 (hbk) 0-19-510882-5 (pbk) Price: £29/$49.95 (hbk) £12.95/$16.95 (pbk).

No sooner was her mind released from the pressure of writing Frankenstein and seeing it through the press, than Mary Shelley was thinking of her next novel. This was to be Valperga, conceived (in the autumn and winter of 1817-1818) in the library at Albion House, Marlow, when the Shelleys were mentally preparing to depart for 'the Paradise of exiles, Italy'. It was not finished until late 1821, by which time she had learned to speak and read Italian fluently, had deeply immersed herself in the history and literature of the country, had lost two of her children and given birth to a lone survivor. She had listened to the songs of the contadini, had walked to the Buche delle Fate, strange hollow rocks on Monte San Giuliano, and visited old towns like Lucca and Vico Pisano. Semi-settled in what was then the sleepy city of Pisa, she had seen the Campo Santo and (we may infer) Orcagna's masterpiece, The Triumph of Death, in which a brooding Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, rides, falcon on fist, past three dead kings. During this period, Italy exploded with abortive rebellions in Piedmont and Naples. All of these experiences and events may be found subsumed into her 'child of mighty slow growth'. In 1822 Mary Shelley shipped the completed Castruccio, Prince of Lucca to the desperately money-strapped Godwin for him to dispose of for his own benefit. He changed the name to Valperga (for the better, most will agree) and made cuts to improve saleability, as he thought, but he was able to sell the copyright only after several set-backs; the buyers were G. and W. B. Whittaker, a respectable, but not prestigious firm. Valperga , published in 1823, eight months before the widowed Mary Shelley returned to England, got favourable reviews overall, when one constrasts them to the vituperation which met The Last Man (1826), but the praise was often muted. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly ignored it and the most distinguished review was a hostile one: Lockhart in Blackwood's censured Beatrice's magnificent anathema and (a very recherché objection, this) accused Valperga of succumbing to a new fashion for writing displacement narratives about the recently dead Napoleon! Conversely, part of the reading public felt cheated by a long historical novel when they had expected a spine-chiller from 'The Author of Frankenstein'. One critic claimed to have thrown it aside in disappointment without venturing past the first volume. Sales fell; the print-run of 1000 copies was not exhausted and the remainder was bought up by Henry Colburn three years later. In 1837 Mary Shelley described Valperga as a book which had 'never had fair play, never having been properly published'. It acquired some later academic admirers. F. L. Jones (1944) considered it her best novel, artistically speaking, and William A. Walling (1972) placed it above The Last Man. But it was not to be reprinted until the mid-70s, when Folcroft brought out a facsimile, to be followed by another from Woodstock Books (1994) and in 1996 by the first genuinely new edition (Pickering, edited by myself). But these are all hard-back library volumes. As recently as 1991, I was unable to do more than interest OUP World's Classics and Penguin in a paperback. The proposals were rejected, with regrets, as quite uneconomic. What changed the climate? Suddenly, in 1997-98, the air has grown dark with Valpergas. We have two published paperback editions - Stuart Curran's, under review here, Tilottama Rajan's for Broadview (1998, not yet seen by me, but to be reviewed in the next issue of RoN …