The Merciful Women
Contributors: Alberto Manguel (Translator)
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: November 30, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780802116741
Subjects: Spanish (Language) Contemporary Fiction; Fiction - General; Fiction; Modern fiction; Historical - General; Literary
First sentence: There was something in the tone of this note which gave me great uneasiness.
Description: "It is Switzerland, in 1816. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's wife Mary and Byron's physician Dr Polidori are ensconced in the Villa Diodati beside Lake Geneva. Polidori is a hanger-on whose presence is merely tolerated. Yet he will stop at nothing to outwit them all. He enters a Faustian pact with an elusive penfriend, Annette Legrand, who is the mysterious third member of the infamous Legrand sisters, the notorious vaudeville act.

Annette will produce for him the most compelling vampire tale ever written, which he will read aloud the very night Mary Shelley is to reveal for the first time her tale of Frankenstein. But, in exchange, what can the effete Polidori offer this ghostly female predator, and what is her secret? How real is the insatiable thirst of the sisters for human male fluids? Dream and reality are fantastically blurred for Polidori as he strives to beat the Byron set at their own gothic literary game."--BOOK JACKET.