A glittering group biography from the award winning author of The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi
Villa Diodati. 1816.
In a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and his young wife Mary, gathered for the summer. For three glittering months, this party of young bohemians would share their lives, charged with sexual and artistic tensions. It was a period of extraordinary creativity from which would emerge some of the masterworks of the Romantic period, including Frankenstein.
But there were two other guests at the villa that summer, for whom the season would not be so rosy. With Byron came his young physician, John Polidori, a man with literary aspirations of his own. And joining Mary was her step-sister, the beautiful Claire Clairmont. For Byron and the Shelleys, their stay by the lake would serve to immortalise them in the annals of literary history. But for Claire and Polidori, the Swiss sojourn would scar them forever.
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Praise for The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi:
'Brilliant . . . As a portrait of London life in all its mutinous and anarchic variety this book would be hard to beat
" - * Spectator *
"A fast-paced rumbustious biography . . . Stott evokes both the dizzying excitement and the harshness of theatrical life" - * Observer *
"[A] great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life" - * Guardian 'Book of the Week' *
"Stott's dynamic dramatization grabs our attention, and we, too, as outsiders [like Claire and Polidori], are cannily lured into the poetic celebrity's inner circle" - * Times Literary Supplement *
