Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Mary Shelley has been called "a harrowing life, wonderfully retold" (The Washington Post). This "splendid biography" (The New Yorker) gracefully moves through the dramatic life of the woman behind history's most legendary monster. A daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the daring A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the radical philosopher William Godwin, Mary Shelley grew up amid the literary and political avant-garde of early-nineteenth-century London. She escaped to Europe at seventeen with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, causing a great scandal. On a famous night of eerie thunderstorms, in a villa near Lord Byron's on Lake Geneva, they told ghost stories and tales of horror, giving birth to the idea of Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years. The Mary we meet here, brilliantly brought to life by Seymour from previously unexplored sources, is brave, generous, and impetuous. Struck by tragedy, she lost three of her four children, and when she was only twenty-four, Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy. As Henry Carrigan of Library Journal said, this is "one of the finest and most significant literary biographies of recent years." "Miranda Seymour's biography of Mary Shelley provides a thoughtfully considered, lifelike portrait of a complex, often misunderstood character." — Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times "[Miranda Seymour] has vivid narrative gifts and a perceptive understanding of the main personalities." — Claude Rawson, The New York Times Book Review "Mary Shelley is the most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade." — Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802139481
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	09/10/2002
Edition description:	First Grove Paperback Edition
Pages:	672
Sales rank:	678,957
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

	Illustrations	ix
	Preface	xi
I	A Motherless Child
1	The Age of Prometheus 1789-1800	3
2	A Birth and a Death 1797-1798	21
3	Father and Daughter 1798-1801	35
4	A Shared Life 1801-1807	45
5	Tensions 1807-1812	57
6	A Glassite Household 1812-1814	73
7	Love and Confusion 1814	87
II	Freedom
8	Six Weeks in Europe 1814	103
9	Experiments in Living 1814-1815	114
10	Retreat from London 1815-1816	134
11	Storms on the Lake 1816	146
12	Distressing Events 1816	165
13	At Albion House 1817-1818	179
III	Italy
14	Joys and Losses 1818	203
15	A Mysterious History 1818-1819	217
16	A Loss and a Gain 1819-1820	232
17	In Absentia Clariae 1820	246
18	Life on the Lung'Arno 1821	259
19	Don Juan among the Ladies 1821-1822	278
20	At the Villa Magni May--August 1822	293
IV	A Woman of Ill Repute
21	Bitter Waters 1822-1823	311
22	Fame, of a Kind 1823-1824	329
23	Literary Matters 1824-1829	348
24	Private Matters 1824-1827	366
25	A Curious Marriage 1827-1828	378
26	The Hideous Progeny 1828-1831	390
27	Entering Society 1830-1834	409
28	Relinquishing Pleasure 1833-1836	427
V	Keeper of the Shrine
29	Problems of Reputation 1836-1838	443
30	Reparation and Renewal 1838-1840	464
31	Continental Rambles 1840-1844	475
32	Enter, the Italians 1843-1844	487
33	Blackmail and Forgery 1844-1846	497
34	Anxious Times 1845-1848	513
35	The Chosen One 1848-1851	527
36	Afterlife	540
	Appendices
1	An Account of the Burial of Shelley's Heart	562
2	Some Unpublished Letters	563
3	Portraits of Mary Shelley	567
	Notes	571
	Bibliography	615
	Acknowledgements	619
	Index	621

Editorial Reviews

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.

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews