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
Yeah, and there are other extraordinary ones.
And she writes to William basically proposing marriage to him in the most incredible way.
It's one of the most extraordinary letters I've ever read.
And so that sense of this being not just a family of extraordinary individuals, but a group of extraordinary individuals, if you include Byron, Shelley, Keats, you know, and the group that then moved to Italy.
It's very interesting.
I got a call one day from one of the people associated with the libraries whose husband had been an economist and she wanted her husband's papers to come to the Bodleian.
She'd asked her nephew to sort through them and put them in boxes and the nephew had found something and so this woman called me up and said, can I come out?
She lived in a village outside of Oxford.
Come and have a look at this thing.
She thought I might find it interesting.
So I went out there
And it was volume one of the first edition of Frankenstein.
And it said on the title page in a neat ink hand, which I recognized instantly to Lord Byron from the author.
Yes.
Only volume one, sadly.
Who knows?
And we were able to tie it up with correspondence that it had come out to Italy from London, where Mary Shelley was at the time.
I forget who passed it to Byron in Italy.
So there's this sense of this kind of network of, you know, extraordinary individuals.
And then after Percy's death, there is a conscious effort to kind of curate the literary remains in a very particular way in order to keep the flame alive.
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