Nicole Berry translated the novel in a French edition in 1999. A Spanish edition entitled St. Irvyne o el Rosacruz, translated by Gregorio Cantera Chamorro, was published by Celeste in Madrid in 2002 with an introduction and notes by Roberto Cueto. The book was translated into Swedish by KG Johansson in 2013 in an edition by Vertigo.[3][4] A translation in Persian or Iranian was published in 2023 by Qoqnus by Mehrdad Vosuqi.[5]
Major characters
Wolfstein, a solitary wanderer, an outcast
Ginotti, also known as Frederic Nempere, an alchemist, member of the Rosicrucian, or Rose Cross, secret sect
Megalena de Metastasio, befriends Wolfstein
Cavigni, leader of the bandits
Steindolph, a bandit
Ardolph, chosen as chieftain of the bandits after the death of Cavigni
"Whence and what art thou, execrable shape, That dar'st, though grim and terrible, advance Thy miscreated Front athwart my way."
Plot
The novel opens amidst a raging thunderstorm. Wolfstein is a wanderer in the Swiss Alps who seeks cover from the storm. He is a disillusioned outcast from society who seeks to kill himself. A group of monks carrying a body for burial in a torch-light procession runs into him and saves his life. Bandits attack them and take Wolfstein to an underground hideout. He meets Megalena, whom the bandits have abducted after killing her father in an ambush. After Steindolph, one of the bandits, recites a ballad about the reanimation of the corpse of a nun named Rosa, Wolfstein manages to poison the leader of the bandits, Cavigni, in a second attempt. He is able to escape with Megalena. Ginotti, a member of the bandits, befriends Wolfstein.
Wolfstein and Megalena flee to Genoa where they live together. Olympia, a woman of the town, seduces Wolfstein. Megalena, enraged by the relationship, demands that Wolfstein kill Olympia. Armed with a dagger, Wolfstein is unable to kill her. Olympia kills herself.
Ginotti follows Wolfstein. Ginotti is a member of the Rosicrucian, or Rose Cross, Order. He is an alchemist who seeks the secret of immortality.[6] He tells Wolfstein that he will give him the secret to immortality if he will renounce his faith and join the sect.
Eloise de St. Irvyne is the sister of Wolfstein who lives in Geneva, Switzerland. Ginotti, under his new identity of Frederic Nempere, travels to Geneva and seeks to seduce her.
Ginotti reveals his experiments in his lifelong quest to find the secret of eternal life: "From my earliest youth, before it was quenched by complete satiation, curiosity, and a desire of unveiling the latent mysteries of nature, was the passion by which all the other emotions of my mind were intellectually organized. ... Natural philosophy at last became the peculiar science to which I directed my eager enquiries." He has studied science and the laws of nature to ascertain the mysteries of life and of being: "I thought of death---... I cannot die.---'Will not this nature---will not the matter of which it is composed---exist to all eternity? Ah! I know it will; and, by the exertions of the energies with which nature has gifted me, well I know it shall.'" Ginotti tells Wolfstein that he will reveal the "secret of immortal life" to him if he will take certain prescribed ingredients and "mix them according to the directions which this book will communicate to you" and meet him in the abbey at St. Irvyne.
In the final scene, which takes place at the abbey of St. Irvyne in France, Wolfstein finds the corpse of Megalena in the vaults. An emaciated Ginotti confronts Wolfstein. Wolfstein is asked if he will deny his Creator. Wolfstein refuses to renounce his faith. Lightning strikes the vaults as thunder and a sulphurous windstorm blast the abbey. Both men are struck dead. This is the penalty they pay for "the delusion of the passions", for tampering with forces that they neither can control nor understand in seeking "endless life".
Reception
The novel, originally intended as a much longer "triple decker" novel, circulated as part of the "circulating libraries" which were popular at that time.[7] This was a source of revenue for the publisher of the novel. Shelley ended the novella abruptly, deciding not to develop or integrate the two strands. The result was a much shorter work.
Critics attacked the novel, which received generally negative reviews. The conservative British periodical The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, in a January 1812 review, castigated "the writer, who can outrage nature and common sense in almost every page of his book". The reviewer sought to deter readers from "the perusal of unprofitable and vicious productions."
French author Maurice Sarfati adapted the novel as Wolfstein et Mégaléna, ou La Vengeance du Rosiccrucien, or Wolfstein and Megalena, the Vengeance of the Rosicrucian, in 1980.[8]
The Wolfstein Chapbooks
Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit, chapbook, title page, London, John Bailey, 1822.
The novel was popular enough, however, to be made into two chapbooks in 1822 and 1850. The first chapbook version was entitled Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit and was published and printed by John Bailey at 116, Chancery Lane in London in 1822 after the original novel was republished that year.[7][9][10][11] The chapbook version was a condensed version of the novella in 28 pages meant for popular consumption, serving the same function as a paperback would. The chapbook sold for sixpence.
The story is described on the title page as "A Terrific Romance" with an epigraph by Ossian: "A tale of horror, of murder, and of deeds done in darkness." Added to Wolfstein was the story The Bronze Statue, A Pathetic Tale by another author, Anna Jane Vardill.[7] "The Bronze Statue" had appeared for the first time in print as part of the "Annals of Public Justice" in The European Magazine of May, 1820, signed "V", i.e., Anna Jane Vardill.
Another more condensed twelve page chapbook was published in 1850 by Thomas Redriffe in London entitled Wolfstein, The Murderer; or, The Secrets of a Robber's Cave: A Terrific Romance. To which is Added, The Two Serpents, an Oriental Apologue. The Ossian epigraph appeared on the title page: "A tale of horror, of murder, and of deeds done in darkness." Printed for Thomas Redriffe, Piccadilly. The price was "Two-Pence".[12][13]
Footnotes
↑ Sandy, Mark (2002-09-20). "St Irvyne or the Rosicrucian". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2009-04-12.
↑ Block, Andrew. The English Novel, 1740-1850: A Catalogue Including Prose Romances, Short Stories, and Translations of Foreign Fiction. London: Grafton, 1939, p. 266. Block gives a publication date of 1820.
Sandy, Mark. "St Irvyne or the Rosicrucian". The Literary Encyclopedia. 20 September 2002, accessed 12 April 2009.
Behrendt, Stephen C. Edited by, with Introduction, and notes. Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. Peterborough, ON, Canada: Broadview Press, 2002.
Antippas, Andy P. "The Structure of Shelley's St. Irvyne: Parallelism and the Gothic Mode of Evil." Boyette, Purvis E., editor. Tulane Studies In English, Vol. 18, New Orleans, Tulane University, 1970.
de Hart, Scott D. Shelly Unbound: Uncovering Frankenstein's True Creator. Port Townsend, WA, U.S.: Feral House, 2013.
Finch, Peter. (1999). "Monstrous Inheritance: The Sexual Politics of Genre in Shelley's St.Irvyne." Keats-Shelley Journal: Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hunt, and Their Circles, 48, pp.35–68.
Frigo, Gabriele. "St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: Shelley davvero rosacrociano ad Oxford––1810-11?" Quadernede de Lingue e Letterature, 9 (1984): 33-35.
Grande, James. "The Original Frankenstein, By Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley, ed. Charles E. Robinson: To what extent did Percy Bysshe Shelley work on 'Frankenstein'? A new analysis reveals all." The Independent, Sunday, 16 November 2008.
Hogle, Jerrold E. "Shelley's Fiction: 'The Stream of Fate'." Keats-Shelley Journal: Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hunt, and Their Circles, 30 (1981), pp.78–99.
Jeaffreson, John Cordy. The Real Shelley: New Views of the Poet's Life. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885.
Jones. Frederick L. (1934). "'Alastor' Foreshadowed in St. Irvyne." Publications of the Modern Language Association, 49: pp.969–971.
Lauritsen, John. The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein. Dorchester, MA: Pagan Press, 2007. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the Preface to Frankenstein. The novel was already finished when he contributed at least 4,000-5,000 words in his handwriting. The handwriting approach is inadequate.
Goulding, Christopher. (2002). "The real Doctor Frankenstein?" Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 95(5): 257-9. Christopher Goulding: "My thesis is that she [Mary Shelley] got what science she knew from Percy Shelley."
"Scot's monster role played up". BBC News, 1 May 2002. "[Mary] Shelley: Knew little of science". Christopher Goulding: "[W]e might now give some credit to the time spent six years previously by her husband-to-be in the study of a retired Scots physician in Windsor."
Goulding, Christopher. (November, 2006). "Shelley's Cosmological Sublime: William Herschel, James Lind, and 'The Multitudinous Orb'." Review of English Studies.
King-Hele, Desmond. (1967). "Shelley and Dr. Lind." Keats—Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 18: 1 -6.
King-Hele, Desmond. Shelley: His Thought and Work. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971.
Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Murphy, John V. The Dark Angel: Gothic Elements in Shelley’s Works. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975.
Peck, Walter E. "Interchapter II: The Sources and Significance of St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian", pp.90–100. In Shelley: His Life and Work. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1927.
Rajan, Tilottama. "Promethean Narrative: Overdetermined Form in Shelley’s Gothic Fiction." Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World. Bennett, Betty T. and Stuart Curran, editors. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. pp.240–52.
Roberts, Marie. Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. NY: Routledge, 1989.
Stewart, Trevor. Enlightenment in the Alps: Shelley's Forgotten 'Rosicrucian' Novelette, St. Irvyne (1811) . Revised edition. Septentrione Books, 2011.
Seed, David. "Shelley’s ‘Gothic’ in St. Irvyne and After." In Essays on Shelley, Miriam Allott, ed. Liverpool University Press, 1982, 39-70.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. (The World's Classics). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Whatley, John. (December, 1999). "Romantic and Enlightened Eyes in the Gothic Novels of Percy Bysshe Shelley." Gothic Studies, 1:2, pp.201–21.
Tichelaar, Tyler R. The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption. Ann Arbor, MI: Modern History Press, 2012.
Edmundson, Mark. Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic. Harvard University Press, 1999.
Hedesan, Jo. "The ‘Good Vampire’ Archetype: A Brief Incursion into the Origins of Vampire Stories." Esoteric Coffeehouse, 15 December 2008.
Summers, Montague. The Vampire, His Kith and Kin. Forgotten Books, 2008. Originally published in 1928.
Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. BiblioBazaar, 2006. pp.104–127. Originally published in 1921 in London by Constable.
Lovecraft, H. P. "Supernatural Horror in Literature." The Recluse, No. 1 (1927), pp.23–59.
Brewer, William Dean. The Shelley-Byron Conversation. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994.
Zimmerman, Phyllis. Shelley's Fiction. Los Angeles, CA: Darami Press, 1998.
Shelley, Mary, with Percy Shelley. The Original Frankenstein. Edited and with an Introduction by Charles E. Robinson. Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2008. ISBN978-1-85124-396-9
Wade, Phillip. "Shelley and the Miltonic Element in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Milton and the Romantics, 2 (December 1976), 23-25.
Robinson, Charles E. "Percy Bysshe Shelley's Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein", in The Neglected Shelley edited by Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb.London and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp.117–136.
John William Polidori was a British writer and physician. He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story "The Vampyre" (1819), the first published modern vampire story. Although the story was at first erroneously credited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the author was Polidori.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1819.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1818.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1816.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1811.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1810.
"The Vampyre" is a short work of prose fiction written in 1819 by John William Polidori, taken from the story told by Lord Byron as part of a contest among Polidori, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley. The same contest produced the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. "The Vampyre" is often viewed as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction. The work is described by Christopher Frayling as "the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre."
Mathilda, or Matilda, is the second long work of fiction of Mary Shelley, written between August 1819 and February 1820 and first published posthumously in 1959. It deals with common Romanticism themes of incest and suicide.
The Villa Diodati is a mansion in the village of Cologny near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, notable because Lord Byron rented it and stayed there with Dr. John Polidori in the summer of 1816. Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had rented a house nearby, were frequent visitors. Because of poor weather, in June 1816 the group famously spent three days together inside the house creating stories to tell each other, two of which were developed into landmark works of the Gothic horror genre: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story, by Polidori.
Zastrozzi: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1810 in London by George Wilkie and John Robinson anonymously, with only the initials of the author's name, as "by P.B.S.". The first of Shelley's two early Gothic novellas, the other being St. Irvyne, outlines his atheistic worldview through the villain Zastrozzi and touches upon his earliest thoughts on irresponsible self-indulgence and violent revenge. An 1810 reviewer wrote that the main character "Zastrozzi is one of the most savage and improbable demons that ever issued from a diseased brain".
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 Gothic novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
Wolfstein may refer to
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.
Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire was a poetry collection written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his sister Elizabeth which was printed by Charles and William Phillips in Worthing and published by John Joseph Stockdale in September 1810. The work was Shelley's first published volume of poetry. Shelley wrote the poems in collaboration with his sister Elizabeth. The poems were written before Shelley entered the University of Oxford.
Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit is an 1822 chapbook based on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1811 Gothic horror novel St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian.
Since the initial publication of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, there has existed uncertainty about the extent to which Mary Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, contributed to the text. Whilst the novel was conceived and mainly written by Mary, Percy is known to have provided input in editing and publishing the manuscript. Some critics have alleged that Percy had a greater role—even the majority role—in the creation of the novel, though mainstream scholars have generally dismissed these claims as exaggerated or unsubstantiated. Based on a transcription of the original manuscript, it is currently believed that Percy contributed between 4,000 and 5,000 words to the 72,000 word novel.
Wolfstein, The Murderer; or, The Secrets of a Robber's Cave is an 1850 chapbook based on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1811 Gothic horror novel St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian.
"On Frankenstein" is a review of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus that was written by her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 1817 but not published until 1832.
The eighteenth-century Gothic novel is a genre of Gothic fiction published between 1764 and roughly 1820, which had the greatest period of popularity in the 1790s. These works originated the term "Gothic" to refer to stories which evoked the sentimental and supernatural qualities of medieval romance with the new genre of the novel. After 1820, the eighteenth-century Gothic novel receded in popularity, largely overtaken by the related genre of historical fiction as pioneered by Walter Scott. The eighteenth-century Gothic was also followed by new genres of Gothic fiction like the Victorian penny dreadful.
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