The handwritten first draft of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can currently be viewed in the “Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family” exhibition in Oxford. The show will travel to the New York Public Library next.
According to The Daily Mail, the exhibition will stay at Britain’s Bodleian Library until March 27, 2011. It includes materials from Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley: his spy glass, baby-rattle, and a draft of the poem Ozymandias. It also features items from Mary’s philosopher parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Associate director Richard Ovenden offered this quote: “We are excited that the exhibition will travel to New York after closing in Oxford and enable even more people to learn about this extraordinary literary family.”