 Okay, and now for something completely different, I'm afraid. Thank you both so much, it's been absolutely wonderful, I'm really pleased to be part of this panel. I'm going to be talking about literature, so again, a huge step, it's a lovely variation that we have. I'm going to be talking about Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley, who are the focus of my research and I'm particularly looking at how they write together and what collaboration and literature is and how that works. Just to kind of introduce you a little bit, I'd like to tell you how I met the Shelleys. I discovered Percy Shelley when I was 16-year-old in Dublin and I bought a little volume of his poetry for two euros, got to be the best two euros I've ever spent, one because of the richness and wonderfulness of his poetry and two, it's brought me here, where I am now, and it's a huge study of my life. And then it was several years later, got to be good five, six years later, I came and decided to do an undergraduate degree and I discovered Mary Shelley, who I'd never read before, obviously everyone's hered a Frankenstein, but a lot of people haven't kind of read the book and I read this book and I thought, this is wonderful and this is the wife of that poet that I love so much and I went to see one of my lecturers and I said, I love this poet, I love this novelist, I want to read a book about them, what can you recommend to me? He said, I don't think there is a book and he paused and I can absolutely remember this so clearly and he said, you should write that book, it's taken me about ten years, but I'm on it, I'm on it now and I sort of tell this story, it's kind of anecdotal, it's kind of how I got here, but it's incredibly relevant to what I'm going to be talking about today, about what inspires us, what makes us write things, how does anybody ever come up with an idea in the first place? So where are not all literature students? Why not? So let me just briefly introduce you to my two subjects. So first of all, we have this handsome chap, this is Percy Bush Shelley, great romantic poet from the early 19th century, has sort of written some wonderful things you might be familiar with his works such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, Montblanc and some of his more kind of larger, more esoteric works such as Prometheus Unbound and this is his wife Mary Shelley who is obviously very famous for writing Frankenstein, but also has written some really wonderful, some other wonderful novels such as The Last Man and Valperga which are less widely read but utterly loved by those of us who are Shelley scholars. So they met, they were both very young when they met, he was 21 and she was 16, he was already married, but they fell in love within about two weeks, ran away together and had the most extraordinary eight years together before his death and it's in those eight years that they both write their most famous works and I found it absolutely amazing that people aren't studying these two writers together. I mean you look at somebody like Percy Shelley is often studied with other romantic writers like Byron and Wordsworth and Coleridge and everybody's thinking oh what are the similarities in their works, what are the differences, how are they inspiring each other, but he's not often studied with the woman who he was with not quite every day, nearly every day for eight years and who literally had her desk next to his desk and they're writing the great works. The subtitle of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus and one of Percy Shelley's works I've already mentioned is Prometheus Unbound. I mean this is crying out to be looked at, why hasn't this been done? And it's very interesting why it hasn't been done. Very briefly there was a long period through the 19th century when people didn't really look at women writers and that's thank goodness something that we're trying to kind of make up for nowadays sort of rediscovering these romantic, these female romantic writers. So it's partly kind of making a gender redress but partly I really want to get over this idea that people write things when they're sitting in a tower by themselves and inspiration comes. That isn't how writing works. I've spoken to so many writers, I'm a writer myself, obviously here I am and I know that I wouldn't have done any of this by myself. So to illustrate this I'm going to take a case study and that's the story of Beatrice Chenchi who is a historical figure from 16th century Italy who both of the Shelleys engaged with and I'm going to look at sort of how they have very briefly to look at how they've sort of engaged with her and what their dialogues might have been around her. So they first come across this manuscript. So they moved to Italy in 1818, they lived there for six years. Excuse me. They're given this manuscript by a friend for those of us who don't speak Italian. It's basically the relationship of the death of the family Chenchi in Rome in May 1599. And it's an absolutely brutal story, tragic story of this real family, this tyrannical father. Rather amazing this document relates his crimes as atheism was the worst of his crimes and sodomy was the least of his crimes. Most of my friends fall under that category. It's a significant number and it doesn't mention what I think we can widely or all very widely condemn which is that he was a murderer and a rapist very very widely so and his absolute most horrendous crime was that he raped his own daughter who was Beatrice Chenchi. She then appealed to the authorities telling them what had happened and nobody wanted to listen because he was very wealthy. He was giving money to the state to the church and nobody was listening at this time. And ultimately she was executed for that crime. It's an absolutely tragic story. And so they heard about this story. Maritime Percy Shelley, they're in Italy and they hear this story of this Chenchi family and of this poor girl Beatrice Chenchi and straight away they see its dramatic potential obviously. So this manuscript is given to them by a friend who owns it. It's not published, it's just handwritten 200 year old manuscript and they've just arrived in Italy. Mary Shelley's well I'm trying to learn Italian. May I please have a copy of this and I will translate it and give it back to you. So she makes this translation and it's very interesting when we look at the manuscript and I've been doing a lot of going back and looking at their manuscripts. You can see it's not just her writing. Every now and then Percy Shelley's hand creeps in and he adds a little note. Every now and then you see she's left a blank. Maybe the blank's a bit too long and then he's come in and left supplied a couple of words. Usually they're more difficult words. So there's an example of a kind of tree, there's an example of a kind of torture, not words that you're going to come across living in everyday Italy. So it's obvious that they're working together on this project, leaning over each other's shoulders. What's this word? What's this word? So you can kind of build a picture up of them. Sometimes you can see them using, they're obviously using the same pen because you can see from the flow of the ink it hasn't been changed and they're literally, he's taking it right out of her hand and adding something in. It's really very lovely. So they're inspired by this idea and perhaps Percy Shelley is really excited about it and he really wants Mary to write a play on this story. She's just published Frankenstein. It's been very successful. Even already they can work out, they can tell good reviews are coming in, a bit of money is coming in. To give you a little bit of context, Percy Shelley had published quite a lot of poetry, quite a lot of pamphlets and they weren't doing particularly well. He never got the recognition in his lifetime that he did just, I mean just sort of 40 years after his death he was already very widely appreciated. So he never really got that that praise that he really deserved and also everything he was writing was poetry. He tried to write a bit of, a bit of dramas here and there but he always abandons them. There are all kinds of wonderful fragments in his diaries of things that he started and he always wanted to write in the moment. These are all the things I can see and feel and experience but kind of struggled when it came to plotting something. So he said, Mary, this is an amazing story. You have to tell this poor girl's life. You should write a play or a novel. And Mary's, well actually I've got quite a lot to do, thank you, I've got my own novels to work on. But after a while she starts to write a novel and this is a novel called Matilda which, well, it is now called Matilda. She gave it a different name at the time. It was never published in her lifetime. And I think it has a chance she has a starting point. It goes somewhere very different because she writes about a father, daughter, incest. But it isn't an brutal, aggressive tyrant. It isn't someone forcing himself upon her. She's basically asking the question, what if a good man fell in love with his daughter and he doesn't do anything, he doesn't in any way hurt her, he's just tormented by this love that he feels but he can't express. And so this whole story is, it's a really wonderful book and incredible look at the inner life of a man who can't deal with himself or what he's feeling and then how his daughter ultimately comes to feel tainted by the love that he has for her too. Thoroughly recommend reading it. So she starts to work on this but what happens a little bit later? It's a full year after they've read this that they're in Rome and they see a painting. And this is a painting. And this painting at the time was believed to be of Beatrice Chenchi. Now we've kind of, we've worked a few things out that it probably can't be. But at the time, as far as they were concerned, this was her. And it's really wonderful looking at the things and Percy Shelley writes about this painting so eloquently. He would come and stare at it for days. And he talks about the sadness in her eyes, the melancholy and the lusterless. He says somehow they've lost their life, but they're still looking at you. And with this, it really, it revived their interest in this story. And I think, I mean, I think you can see why I think it is an extraordinary painting and you can really kind of get lost in it. And the story of it was that this was actually painted before her execution. So she is in prison waiting to be summoned to the execution. And Percy Shelley was so inspired about this. And he writes, he writes all these letters to his friends saying, it's an extraordinary woman. And you can see the dignity and the sadness in her face that she had no way out of this horrendous situation of this abusive father she couldn't get away from. So she took his life. And there was no sympathy, no one there to kind of offer her anything. And he goes again to Mary and he says, I know you're writing Matilda, but you've got to write this book. And it's really interesting. I'm kind of summarizing these things here. I'm putting these bits together from bits of her notebooks, bits of her diary, bits from his notebooks, and bits from his letters. They don't spend enough time apart. It's really frustrating. They never write letters to each other. Every time one of them goes away, it's wonderful. You can write and tell us what you're thinking. But in the letters, we see these little hints. Oh, Mary, do have a think about that. Do try this. Make sure you bring a few pages of this when you come to see me. He really tells you, you should write this play, a play on the life of Beatrice Censhi. And she says, no person, you should write this play. And it's wonderful. You can see the moment in their letters where she says, no, this is something you've got to do. This is something you feel so passionately about. And you've got to write it. And he again and again says, I can't. He writes to a friend saying, I thought about writing this play, but you will say I have no dramatic talent, and you're absolutely right. I don't. Again, he talks to Mary and says, you have the superior talent here. I think that's interesting because a lot of people think of Mary Shelley as being the younger one, the one who didn't know what she was doing so well. He definitely looked at her as being the greater writer. And at last, he does start to write it, but he writes it with her. She organizes the scenes. And we know this from the notes that she writes long after his death. She says, how did they sat down? She helped him to organize the scenes to plot out the whole structure of the work. And I think it's really interesting that when he finally decides to write this, he turns to her. He says, you are the person who has the ability to make this. I can write the actual text. I can bring in the images. I can bring in the characterization. But you need to structure this whole story. And it is a wonderful, extraordinary play. Wordsworth said it was the greatest play of the age. And I'm inclined to agree with him. There's further use of Beatrice Censci in Mary Shelley's writings. She talks a little bit about, in her third novel, Valperga, which is set in 16th century Italy. She has a character called Beatrice who does a lot of what this character does and has a lot of similarities to this person. I think she's definitely drawing on it, even though she didn't decide to do that play exactly, as it had been suggested. She's inspired by it and takes that on. And now this is just, this is one example of numerous, numerous ways that the Shelleys do collaborate. And they do kind of, I'm talking here about a collaboration of influence, but I also see collaboration, events of collaboration, actual textual, where they're supplying words for each other and helping each other kind of come up with ideas and structure their works. And I suppose it is clear they collaborate. That is a thing that I think I can now say with absolute confidence. And I suppose the question I often get is, well why does that matter? It matters because in the historical context women have so often been written out of history. Women's writing has been ignored. And the amount of books that I have read that say Percy Shelley was a great poet, his wife is intimidated by him, she wrote a little novel. And that isn't the representation you get when you actually look at their letters, when you look at how they refer to each other. And also it's, they didn't come up with their own ideas. A great poet like Percy Shelley, a romantic poet, you do think of him wandering through a wood, writing as he goes. We have these romantic ideas of what a writer is and that's just not true. If I think about all the people who have helped me in this and this work is, it's structured as a novel. I've come a long way and on Mary Shelley's advice I've turned it into a novel. If I think about the advice I've gotten from my supervisors, from the friends who've looked over what I wrote and said, oh change this, how about this? If I think about what I'm reading from Mary Shelley and most of all if I think right back to that first lecturer who said you should give that book, right, give writing this book a go, well it makes a lot of sense to me that these things are collaborations. So in conclusion we all write together and also you should read Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley if you don't already because they're wonderful. Thank you very much.