Valperga

Valperga Review

Valperga, published in 1823, is the novel Mary Shelley wanted to write before she wrote the novels she is remembered for. It required five years of preparation, deep historical research into medieval Italian chronicles and sources, and a genuine effort to reconstruct the political world of fourteenth-century Tuscany. It is her most ambitious and most underread major work.

The historical subject is Castruccio Castracani, a real condottiere — mercenary warlord — who rose to rule Lucca in the early fourteenth century and was the subject of one of Machiavelli’s biographical sketches. Shelley takes the historical framework but transforms its meaning: where Machiavelli admired Castruccio as a model of effective political ruthlessness, Shelley tracks what his ruthlessness costs, and centres that cost not in abstract principle but in the person of Euthanasia, Countess of Valperga.

Euthanasia is a remarkable creation. She is a philosopher, a ruler, a lover, and ultimately a political actor who must choose between her love for Castruccio and her responsibility to the people his ambition is destroying. This is not the subordinated heroine of Gothic convention but a woman of serious intellectual life who is the novel’s genuine moral centre. The question of what to do when the person you love becomes someone whose actions you cannot endorse is given here a treatment of unusual depth and honesty.

Shelley’s portrait of Castruccio tracks a familiar tragic arc — the idealistic youth formed by exile and hardship, the capable soldier who discovers a gift for command, the ruler who gradually discovers that maintaining power requires compromises that corrupt it. The political anatomy is precise and carries obvious contemporary resonance for readers in 1823 who had just watched Napoleon complete his own version of this trajectory.

The novel’s length and the density of its historical material have kept it in relative obscurity. This is a genuine loss. Valperga is the work of Shelley’s mature intelligence applied to questions she cared most deeply about — power, idealism, love, and political responsibility — and it deserves a much larger readership than it has found.

Our rating: 3.8/5

Five Years of Research

Mary Shelley spent approximately five years preparing Valperga before she wrote it, researching medieval Italian chronicles, political history, and cultural life with the rigor of a scholar rather than a novelist. The depth of this preparation is visible on every page: the political world of fourteenth-century Tuscany — the rivalry between Guelfs and Ghibellines, the specific mechanics of condottiere power, the texture of civic life in the city-states — is rendered with authority rather than approximation.

Shelley (1797–1851), born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and married to Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816, had grown up in a household where serious intellectual labor was the expected norm. Her father William Godwin was a philosopher and novelist; her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, who died eleven days after giving birth to her, was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The intellectual ambition of Valperga reflects this formation: Shelley was not writing for the market but for the questions she cared most about.

Castruccio and the Napoleon Problem

The historical Castruccio Castracani had been treated admiringly by Machiavelli as a model of effective political ruthlessness. Shelley’s transformation of this figure — tracking what his effectiveness costs, centering that cost in the person he destroys — is an implicit argument with Machiavelli and an explicit engagement with the question that dominated her intellectual circle: what do we make of men whose power is real and whose means are destructive?

Napoleon’s shadow falls over Valperga: a man who had inspired idealistic revolutionary hopes and ended by becoming a tyrant, whose trajectory from idealistic young officer to effective oppressor followed exactly the arc Shelley traces in Castruccio. For readers in 1823, the parallel would have been unmistakable. Shelley was using medieval history to think about contemporary political reality, and the thinking is precise and unsentimental.

Euthanasia as Counter-Model

Against Castruccio’s trajectory, Euthanasia offers a model of political life organized around responsibility rather than power. She is a ruler — the Countess of Valperga commands real authority — but her authority is exercised in the service of her people rather than her ambition. Her gradual shift from lover to political opponent is the novel’s central drama, and it raises the question Shelley was uniquely positioned to ask: what do you do when you love someone who is becoming someone whose actions you cannot endorse?

The answer Shelley gives — continue to love while refusing to enable, oppose while continuing to grieve — is among the most psychologically honest responses to this dilemma in nineteenth-century fiction.

A Tyrant and His Conscience

Valperga (1823) sets the historical condottiere Castruccio Castracani, the fourteenth-century warlord of Lucca, against two women who measure his moral descent: the republican-minded Euthanasia, whose castle of Valperga gives the book its name, and the doomed mystic Beatrice. Shelley uses the rise of a charismatic tyrant to examine ambition’s cost, weaving deep historical research into a critique of the great-man worship of her age.

Shelley contrasts Castruccio’s seductive will to power with the steadfast republican virtue of Euthanasia, making the novel an implicit argument against the great-man worship of her era — a quiet rebuke, some critics have noted, even to the Byronic and Napoleonic heroes her own circle admired.

Long overshadowed by Frankenstein, Valperga has been reclaimed by modern scholars as evidence of Shelley’s serious engagement with history and politics, and as proof that her imagination ranged far beyond the single myth for which she is remembered.