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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Secret Life of Books · Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE · 6 Feb 2026
podcast
And you see Percy's hand intervening in the text in a kind of editorial fashion.
In a very different hand, a very different pen.
It's got a different nib, a different ink.
So it's very clear.
The original text and its intervention are very clear that there's no kind of confusion about who is writing what.
And I think what we were able to do shortly after we acquired it, so we did raise the money and we were able to purchase it, is that we published a new edition of Frankenstein which had Percy's text removed.
Because what happened then is that...
The fair copy is an amalgam of Mary's original and Percy's editorial intervention.
And that is what Percy then took around to the publishers in London and placed in their hands to try and find a publisher in 1818.
And of course, the original title page of the three-volume, the three-decker novel does not have an author attribution on the title page.
Yes.
And I think they must have felt that this woman who no one had heard of is not going to get published by saying it's Mary Shelley.
So Percy takes it around.
And I think everyone assumes that he's the writer.
No, it's not weird in that sense.
That then eventually gets published.
And then the second edition, which is 1821, does have Mary's name on it.
And so and in that intervening period, there's it becomes a sensation and there are stage adaptations and Mary's name becomes associated with it.
Of course, Percy's died by this point.
And so she kind of needs the literary reputation partly to source an income.
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