Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne: Two Gothic Novels

Written by Shelley at the age of 17, these novels are of interest 200 years later as early artifacts of the age of the Gothic horror novel, an era that also produced the magnificent Frankenstein by Shelley’s wife, Mary. A brief but complex tale of romance and revenge, Zastrozzi - like its companion, St. Irvyne - manifests the creative flair of its young author. AUTHOR: After his childhood in the Sussex countryside, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822) attended Eton College and Oxford University. By the second decade of the 19th century, he was living mostly abroad and writing poems that didn’t bring him fame during his lifetime but grew steadily in both critical stature and popular acclaim after his death. Poems including Ozymandias,
Ode to the West Wind,
To a Skylark, and many others - such as his 1820 masterpiece Prometheus Unbound - cemented his position as one of the greatest poets of the English Romantic period. Shelley drowned at the age of 29 in a sailing accident during a storm in the Italian Gulf of Spezia.