SOURCE: Hughes, A. M. D. “Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne.” Modern Language Review 7 (1912): 54-63.

In the following essay, Hughes provides a brief introduction of how Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk and Ann Radclffe's The Italian influenced Gothic romances in general and Dacre's Zofloya in particular. The critic also investigates the influence of Zofloya on P. B. Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, which, the writer argues, replicate Zofloya's plot and some of its characters.

The long disregarded romances of Shelley come under a new light in Dr A. H. Koszul's brilliant book, La Jeunesse de Shelley (Paris, 1910), which shows how much they foreshadow of the poet's later self—his bias for the extremes of energy, sensibility, and passion, his heresy and mysticism. In the Revue Germanique for March, 1905 the same scholar indicates the main source of the novels in Mrs Byrne's Zofloya or The Moor, as well as...