Mary Shelley letters unearthed

BBC news has reported the discovery of a cache of previously unknown letters by Mary Shelley. The find came while Professor Nora Crook of Anglia Ruskin University was researching the holdings of a public records office in Essex, UK. The discovery of the letters, addressed to Horace Smith and his daughter Eliza, was quite by accident, according to Crook. A brief extract from the BBC article explains Crook's account of the find: "I had an idea that an anonymous review of a book by Miss Crumpe might be by Mary Shelley." 

That idea turned out to be wrong but the search took her to the Essex Record Office's online archive.  It was while looking at documents there that she came across a letter from Shelley joking her father was "half in love" with Miss Crump.  "I knew immediately that the phrase had to come from an unpublished letter—and there turned out to be more," she added. 

The full article is available here.  Another account can be found on the Cambridge Network here. 

Nora Crook is a member of the K-SAA and a former recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award.