The keepsake for MDCCCXXXIII

London: Published by Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, [1833]. 308pp. With an engraved presentation plate, an engraved frontispiece, an additional engraved title page, and a further 14 engraved plates. Contemporary richly gilt-tooled red morocco, A.E.G. Minor shelf-wear. Internally clean and crisp. An attractively bound anthology of prose and verse, including contributions by Agnes Strickland, Letitia Landon, and, most notably, two short stories by Mary Shelley, billed as 'the Author of Frankenstein; 'The Brother and Sister, an Italian Tale' and 'The Invisible Girl, a Tale'. The former, set in Siena, is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet; indeed the opening lines reference the Bard directly: 'It is well known that the hatred borne by one family against another, and the strife of parties, which often led to bloodshed in the Italian cities during the middle ages, so vividly described by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, was not confined to the Montecchi and Ciapelletti of Verona, but existed with equal animosity in almost every other town of that beautiful peninsula'. The latter is the first appearance of a tragic tale set on the coasts of Wales, that interweaves motifs characteristic of Gothic fiction, including a tyrannical guardian, a persecuted heroine, and a supernatural apparition. Faxon 1494.. 8vo.