The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus

John William Polidori

Sep 2007 · Broadview Press

About this ebook

In 1816, John William Polidori travelled to Geneva as Lord Byron’s personal physician. There they met Mary Godwin (later Shelley) and her lover Percy Shelley and decided to while away a wet summer by writing ghost stories. The only two to complete their stories were Mary Shelley, who published Frankenstein in 1818, and Polidori, whose The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold were both published in 1819.

The Vampyre, based on a discarded idea of Byron’s, is the first portrayal of the alluring vampire figure familiar to readers of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice. Ernestus Berchtold scandalously draws on the rumours of Byron’s affair with his half-sister for a Faustian updating of the myth of Oedipus, which it combines with an account of the struggle of Swiss patriots against the Napoleonic invasion.

Along with Polidori’s work, this edition also includes stories read and written by the travellers in the Genevan summer of 1816 and contemporary responses to The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold.

About the author

The late D.L. Macdonald was Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Kathleen Scherf is Professor and Dean in the Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary. They are the co-editors of the Broadview editions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindications (1997), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1999), and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (2004).