From June 29 until November 6, 2015, the Keats-Shelley House in Rome will be offering a special exhibition “Lord Byron in the Hand of Mary Shelley”. The exhibition presents a sequence of manuscripts on loan from the National Library of Scotland, alongside Byron treasures from the Keats-Shelley House’s own collection – which explores the fascinating relationship between these two important figures of Romantic Literature and the ways in which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley edited Byron’s work in preparation for its publication.

Mary Shelley met Lord Byron in the fateful summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, from where the legendary contest of literary lights reading ghost stories launched the 18 year old Mary’s own writing career with imagining of the student of science and his monster. Mary and the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” Byron, were introduced through Mary’s step-sister’s machinations. Claire Clairmont was pregnant with Byron’s child that summer and Mary had recently given birth to her first son, William, in January of that year. Byron wanted nothing to do with Claire, and would later epically fight over their daughter, Allegra, but the poet and Mary, seemed to develop a friendship. Bryon would never return to England, and his beloved Newstead Abbey, but from these manuscripts it appears Mary acted as a publishing contact following her husband’s tragic death in Italy.

The Keats-Shelley House is the residence in Rome just next to the famous Spanish Steps, where the Romantic poets Keats, Percy Shelley and Lord Gordon Byron lived while Rome, now a museum, library and exhibition center dedicated to the works and lives of the poets. The library houses 8,000 volumes of books, periodicals of these second generation Romantics, with an especially extensive collection of editions of Byron related works, collected by the library’s originator Harry Nelson Gay, as well as many lifetime and nineteenth-century editions of the works of other Romantics and influential writers of the period including William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, William Godwin and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, with a small collection of travel and history books celebrating the European ‘Grand Tour’.

Entrance to the exhibition is included in the price of the standard museum entrance ticket. Keats-Shelley House