MITH is pleased to announce the receipt of a generous grant from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to support our work on the Shelley-Godwin Archive, under the supervision of MITH Director and Shelley scholar, Neil Fraistat.
A recent recipient of a three-year grant from NEH’s division of Preservation and Access, the Shelley-Godwin Archive will contain in digital form all available manuscripts and first editions of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. This single family–Mary Shelley was the daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and the wife of Percy Bysshe–embodies an archetype of British Romanticism: all four struggled in their writings and lives to change the world. Their most important works–Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, P.B. Shelley’s Queen Mab, and Prometheus Unbound, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein–received very different degrees of acclaim in their authors’ lifetimes. All, however, have had lasting and profound effects on international culture.
MITH is partnering in this work with the Bodleian Libraries of University of Oxford, the Huntington Library, the Houghton Library of Harvard College, the British Library, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library, which together hold more than an estimated 90% of the known manuscripts. The project aims to create an innovative archival framework constituting a new model of best practices for research libraries wishing to make freely available to the public their manuscript and print holdings. During the three-year initial phase of the project, the project will be including the nearly thirty known Percy Shelley notebooks and his major philosophical poem, Queen Mab, with his extensive reworking; all of the manuscripts for and the first three editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, along with the first two volumes of Mary Shelley’s journals; the manuscripts of two novels by William Godwin, Fleetwood and Cloudesley; and the ten volumes of Shelley and his Circle with their invaluable research and all the manuscripts contained in those volumes.
The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation will be supporting the work of a team of encoding specialists to begin work on the Shelley-Godwin Archive materials beginning in January 2012. On behalf of the Shelley-Godwin Archive partners, MITH would like to thank the Delmas Foundation for their generous support.
Visit the Shelley-Godwin Archive at www.shelleygodwinarchive.org, or follow on Twitter @shelleygodwin.