Lodore

by Mary Shelley

Overview

Also published as The Beautiful Widow, Mary Shelley’s penultimate novel explores the web of relationships between three women bound together by the exacting Lord Lodore: Cornelia, Lodore’s estranged wife, ruled by her mother and the norms of aristocratic society; Ethel, his daughter, raised in the wilderness of Illinois and utterly reliant on her father; and finally, the independent and highly educated Fanny Derham, the daughter of Lodore’s childhood friend. Long considered the most Austen-like and socially oriented of Mary Shelley’s novels, Lodore is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand this brilliant feminist writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781023582131
Publisher:	Anson Street Press
Publication date:	03/29/2025
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was the author of five novels and numerous works of short fiction, though she is best known for Frankenstein. The daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley was steeped in the progressive ideas of the early-19th-century British Romantic era.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
A Note on the Text
Mary Shelley: A Brief Chronology

Lodore

Appendix A: Mary Shelley—Woman of Letters

1. “The Bride of Modern Italy” (1824)
2. From Review of The Loves of the Poets (1829)
3. From Review of Cloudesley; A Tale (1830)
4. From “Ugo Foscolo,” Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal (1837)

Appendix B: Some Literary Contexts

1. George Gordon, Lord Byron, from Lara (1814)
2. The Tempest and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Female Reader (1797)
3. Thomas Campbell, from Gertrude of Wyoming (1809)
4. Edward John Trelawny from Adventures of a Younger Son (1831)

Appendix C: Illinois and Duelling

1. Morris Birkbeck, from Letters from Illinois (1818)
2. William Cobbett, from A Year’s Residence in America (1818-19)
3. Frances Wright, from Views of Society and Manners in America (1821)
4. William Godwin, from Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Third Edition (1798)
5. James Fenimore Cooper, from Notions of the Americans (1828)

Appendix D: Domesticity and Women’s Education

1. Mary Wollstonecraft, from Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
2. Mary Wollstonecraft, from Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
3. William Godwin, from The Enquirer (1797)
4. Anna Jameson, from Characteristics of Women (1832)
5. Sarah Stickney Ellis, from The Women of England (1839)

Appendix E: Contemporary Reviews of Lodore

1. From The Athenæum
2. From The Examiner
3. From Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country
4. From Leigh Hunt’s London Journal
5. From The Literary Gazette
6. From New Monthly Magazine
7. From The Sun

Select Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Not the one book author that Frankenstein sometimes make her seem, Mary Shelley was a complex and committed social thinker whose novels reveal her deep concern with the impact of the emerging Victorian social dynamic upon the lives of women. While Lodore reflects Shelley’s conviction of the importance to the new bourgeois family model of the ‘genuine affections of the human heart,’ it shows us too, in the person of the remarkable Fanny Derham, the consequences for a free-thinking and independent woman who has learned ‘to be afraid of nothing.’ Vargo’s splendid edition resituates Shelley within the 1830s milieu of successful literary women like Landon and Hemans who understood their readers and their marked, and within a culture that was moving rapidly away from the exuberant Romanticism of only two decades earlier. With its illuminating critical introduction, and its extensive contextualizing appendices, this exceptional edition will alert readers anew to the complexity and sophistication of Shelley’s mind and art.” — Stephen C. Behrendt, University of Nebraska

“This volume marks yet another excellent addition to Broadview’s expanding list of literary writings that have long been out of print.” — Nineteenth-Century Literature

“Vargo has provided a much-needed, comprehensive edition of the text.” — University of Toronto Quarterly

From the Publisher

"Vargo has provided a much-needed, comprehensive edition of the text."

University of Toronto Quarterly

"This volume marks yet another excellent addition to Broadview's expanding list of literary writings that have long been out of print."

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Not the one book author that Frankenstein sometimes make her seem, Mary Shelley was a complex and committed social thinker whose novels reveal her deep concern with the impact of the emerging Victorian social dynamic upon the lives of women. While Lodore reflects Shelley's conviction of the importance to the new bourgeois family model of the ‘genuine affections of the human heart,' it shows us too, in the person of the remarkable Fanny Derham, the consequences for a free-thinking and independent woman who has learned ‘to be afraid of nothing.' Vargo's splendid edition resituates Shelley within the 1830s milieu of successful literary women like Landon and Hemans who understood their readers and their marked, and within a culture that was moving rapidly away from the exuberant Romanticism of only two decades earlier. With its illuminating critical introduction, and its extensive contextualizing appendices, this exceptional edition will alert readers anew to the complexity and sophistication of Shelley's mind and art.

Stephen C. Behrendt University of Nebraska