DATA FILE
The legend of the spooky night at Villa Diodati was established in Mary Shelley’s 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, in which she described how “Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands…” In the opening scene, Byron’s dialogue suggests that he’s reading from Tales of the Dead (1813), the English translation of the French anthology Fantasmagoriana (1812) - the volume that the real-life Byron actually read from. The saga of “Hildegarde, the Death-Bride” is paraphrased from a passage in The Death-Bride, known in the French as La Morte Fiancée. In the original German, it was Die Todtenbraut by Friedrich Laun - . rst published in the second volume of Das Gespensterbuch (‘The Ghost Book’, 1811).
BBC One, 16 February 2020