MIRELLA BILLI is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Viterbo and the University of Florence. She has published books and articles on Gothic (Il Gotico inglese, 1986), on Virginia Woolf and other Modernist writers, on nineteenth-and twentieth-century poetry and narrative (Il vortice fisso, 1983), and a volume on literary parody and postmodern re-writing and historical metafiction (Il testo riflesso, 1993). Her translations include Virginia Woolf’s essays on writers, Jacob’s Room, and Mary Shelley’s Matilda.