It’s Alive! Shelley-Godwin Archive Launched

The Shelley-Godwin Archive, launched on October 31, is now live. The new digital resource comprises the manuscripts of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  For the first time ever, the widely scattered manuscripts of England’s “first family of writers” are being brought together in digital form online for worldwide use.  Visit the site at www.shelleygodwinarchive.org.  Since its release, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others, have covered the new resource.  Created in partnership with the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the MITH at the University of Maryland, the Shelley-Godwin Archive makes manuscripts and early editions of works by these four key writers of British Romantic literature freely available to the public online.  They will enable scholars to study, annotate, and manipulate manuscripts in ways that they could never do with paper or single images. Bringing all four writers together, it will allow scholars to unite the critical, historical, and biographical strands of their research.  Most of the primary material in the Shelley-Godwin Archive is drawn from The NYPL’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle and the Bodleian's Shelley holdings, the two foremost collections of these materials in the world.