Richard Ovenden, OBE

speaker

227 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 6 Feb

Richard Ovenden, OBE’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Secret Life of Books · Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE · 6 Feb 2026 podcast

It was a whole, a huge 18,000 pieces of paper.

Mary Wollstonecraft, you know, all of her correspondence, William Godwin's diaries.

I forget, 30 odd volumes of his diaries and extraordinary work.

document detailing all of their kind of literary and political connections he was a kind of famous anarchist um and then um Mary's own archive again huge amount of correspondence but the core of it were two um two things one is the joint journals of Mary and Percy Shelley um

Four volumes of those, the final of which is called The Journal of Sorrow, which recounts the death of Percy and Mary's life after his death.

And the first volume of those deals with their elopement, originally in...

I think it was 1816.

No, they married in 1816.

This is 1814.

And then there's the Frankenstein manuscript.

So there's the main manuscript, a draft and a fair copy.

Yes.

So if we go back to 1817, sorry, 1816, Percy and Mary go to Italy and they pass through Switzerland and they stay in Geneva in Byron's Villa, the Villa Diodati.

And there is a famous...

evening where they have a dinner party.

And Dr. Polidori, another Englishman, is there.

Byron is there.

Percy and Mary are there.

And there is a thunderstorm.

And in the thunderstorm, they have this ghost story competition.

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