A staged reading of Horace Walpole’s play The Mysterious Mother (1768)

Directed by Misty G. Anderson, Lindsay Young Professor of English, University of Tennessee

As part of the year-long celebrations of the tercentenary of Horace Walpole’s birth, the Lewis Walpole Library and the Yale Center for British Art are collaborating to present a staged reading of The Mysterious Mother. Completed just a few years after Walpole’s celebrated gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), this under-appreciated tale of incest and intrigue was initially circulated only among the author’s friends. Walpole never permitted it to be performed during his lifetime except as a private theatrical.