The Romantics - Jane Austen meets Frankenstein

When: 11 March - 22 June, weekdays 9am - 5pm, weekends 10am - 4pm 

Where: Sir George Grey Special Collections, Level 2, Central City Library
Cost: Free

The Romantics: Jane Austen meets Frankenstein is an exhibition of rare books and manuscripts from the Sir George Grey Special Collections.

It covers the period from the late 18th century to the early 19th century when there was a revolutionary mood in art and literature, and a new emphasis on the imagination and the emotions.

The two most popular names in this exhibition are Jane Austen and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Pictured: An illustration from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by Lynd Ward.

We will have on display a first edition (1818) of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in which she parodies the excesses of the gothic novel, including the Mysteries of Udolpho, which is also on show in the form of a first edition from 1795.

Frankenstein was Mary Shelley's later contribution to the genre, here exhibited in a 1934 edition with powerful wood engravings by Lynd Ward.

The exhibition also features the famous Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge (Lyrical ballads 1798), Byron, Shelley and Keats, Burns and Blake.

There are important early editions, such as William Blake's America, of which only 17 copies survive, as well as some modern interpretations of famous poems.

In addition, the exhibition contains original handwritten letters by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, the scientist and poet Sir Humphry Davy, and Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns. These were all collected by Sir George Grey.