Daisy Hay

‘Invention...does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos’ - Mary Shelley In the 200 years since its first publication, the story of Frankenstein's creation during stormy days and nights at Byron's Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva has become literary legend. In this book, Daisy Hay returns to the objects and manuscripts of the novel's genesis in...

A portrait of a radical age via the writers who gather around a publisher's dining table - from William Wordsworth to Mary Wollstonecraft. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize In late eighteenth-century London, a group of extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week. The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller, and he was joined at dinner...