Thursday, 2 August 2018 at 7:00 pm – Thursday, 2 August 2018 at 9:30 pm

In Search of Mary Shelley: the girl who wrote Frankenstein

Frankenstein turned 200 this year, and to celebrate the bicentennial we are throwing a birthday party!

As well as a wine reception, attendees can celebrate with cake from Conjurer’s Kitchen, whose deliciously dark creations have gone down a treat at previous Gothic Manchester Festival events, and we will be joined by Fiona Sampson, the writer of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein.

In the two hundred years since the nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley brought her monstrous creation to life, Frankenstein has experienced quite an afterlife; transplanted from the page to the stage before Hollywood reanimated the tale, Frankenstein and his monster have become two of our most enduring archetypes.

Shelley’s own life story is less known. The daughter of a proto-feminist writer who died shortly after giving birth, she was raised by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, philosophers and writers before she eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was just sixteen, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe.

In her biography, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. She uncovers a complex, generous character – friend, intellectual, lover and mother – trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly.

Sampson will read from and discuss her biography, and sign copies of the book.

Fiona Sampson is a prize-winning poet and writer. She has been published in more than thirty languages and received an MBE for services to literature. A Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, and the recipient of a number of national and international honours for her poetry, she has worked as an editor, translator, and university professor as well as a violinist.

Tickets are £5 and available here.