Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour Narrated by Sandra Duncan

Overview

`The most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade...' - Financial Times

`To be savoured for its vivid and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times of the gifted Mary Shelley' - Times Literary Supplement

`Brilliant and enthralling' - Independent On Sunday

'Wonderfully vivid' - Spectator

The definitive and richly woven biography of Mary Shelley, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein

The creator of the world's most famous outsider became one herself . . .

There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From that emerged Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations for two hundred years.

Miranda Seymour illustrates the rich and unexplored life of Mary Shelley. Everything from her childhood to her tempestuous relationship with Percy Shelley; Seymour brings to life the brilliant mind that created Frankenstein through unexplored and intriguing sources.

The Mary Shelley we meet here is a woman we can engage with and understand. Her world, so rich in its settings and its cast of characters, seems drawn from a novel. She, at its centre, is flawed, brave, generous, and impetuous, a woman whose dark and brilliant imagination gave us a myth which seems ever more potent in our own era.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Twenty-five years ago, Seymour wrote a historical novel based on Lord Byron's life that reflected the prevailing view of Mary Shelley, the willful child-bride who, briefly touched by her husband's genius, produced one extraordinary work before sinking back into her native mediocrity and conventionality. Now, in this splendid biography, Seymour makes handsome amends. The Mary Shelley who emerges here is a remarkably mature and steady woman who suffered greatly, first from her erratic husband's self-absorption and then from losing three of her four children before she turned 25. Close to penniless after her husband's death by drowning, she successfully turned to hack work to support her son, her father and his second wife. In her vulnerable position as an unmarried woman making her own living, widely viewed as scandalous and immoral, she was frequently the target of slander. Throughout it all, she remained quick to speak out in defense of women like herself, who had struck out for personal freedom and been condemned for it. The tangle of irregular sexual connections, illegitimacy and adultery that characterized Shelley's circle of literary friends will surprise readers unfamiliar with early Victorian manners, as will the modern-sounding postmortem spin placed on Mary's and Percy's respective reputations. Nor is Frankenstein neglected, as Seymour convincingly argues for its roots in Mary's detestation of slavery and uncovers biographical sources for some of its scenes. Her primary concern, however, is the whole life of her subject, whom she admires deeply and whom she presents as flawed but heroic. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Writers from Emily Sunstein (Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, LJ 1/89) to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their seminal The Madwoman in the Attic (LJ 9/1/79) have portrayed Mary Shelley as a nascent feminist optimistic about changing the political currents of her day. Novelist and biographer Seymour (Life on the Grand Scale: Ottoline Morrell) strongly challenges these views in her animated and elegant chronicle of Shelley's life and work. Born to two of the most famous parents in 19th-century England philosopher and novelist William Godwin and political activist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died ten days after giving birth to Mary the young girl inherited their intellectual perspicacity. When she was 16, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and by the time she was 24, she had been widowed, lost three of her four children in infancy, and written what was to become her most famous book, Frankenstein. Although she wrote several novels and contributed historical essays to encyclopedias after Percy's death, she sacrificed her own reputation in order to secure her husband's. Seymour's portrayal of Mary as a woman struggling against the black clouds of despair, haunted by the idea that her own misfortunes were punishment for having stolen Percy from his first wife, Harriett, convincingly challenges the conventional view of Mary as an active and optimistic woman of letters. Seymour's lively writing, penetrating critical insights, and attention to detail elevate this to one of the finest and most significant literary biographies of recent years. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/01.] Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A new biography of the author of Frankenstein that aims to comprehend her character rather than assess or advance her literary standing. The first part of the story is well-known. In 1814, 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of two brilliant and celebrated liberal thinkers, eloped with her father's married disciple, Percy Shelley. Two years later, Mary's masterpiece was conceived on a stormy night at Byron's house in Switzerland. After eight itinerant years in Percy's entourage, which included her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she returned to England with her one surviving child, widowed, penniless, and, despite first-class literary connections that she retained throughout her life, a social pariah. Determined to exhalt Percy's literary reputation but forbidden by her intransigent father-in-law from using his name in print, she wrangled with publishers and biographers behind the scenes, writing what she could to support her family. She died in 1851, almost 30 years after her husband. In able if somewhat repetitive prose, novelist and biographer Seymour (Robert Graves, 1995, etc.) considers the personality of a woman who, having defied convention in youth, courted respectability for the rest of her life. Though won over by the poet's passions for sexual freedom and social justice, Mary was never a Shelleyan radical; she married Percy as soon as she could and always resented Claire's presence in their menage. Most biographers have considered how the events in Mary's life fed the chronic sense of abandonment that Frankenstein's Creature so magnificently expresses. Seymour prefers to emphasize Mary's obsessive temperament and her guilt over the suicide of Percy's first wife andover her own withdrawal from the poet before he died. Defending Mary's later narrowness, Seymour points out the unhappiness of a life burdened throughout by financial distress and the distortions of celebrity. Aside from her political ideas and activities, which Seymour carefully tracks, Mary's other intellectual interests are rather neglected. They are better addressed by Muriel Spark's 40-year-old study and by more recent criticism, to which this work serves as a worthy complement. An evocative, empathetic treatment of what was, in all senses of the word, a difficult life.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173491558
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster UK
Publication date:	08/15/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos