Reference.com

Mary Shelley

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British writer. She was the daughter of the political philosopher William Godwin and the writer, philosopher, and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died of puerperal fever eleven days after giving her birth. Mary Shelley is best known for her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which a student gives life to the body parts of corpses, creating a monster who turns on his maker. She also wrote six other novels, as well as travel books, dramas, short stories, essays, and biographies. She married the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Mary Godwin was at first brought up, along with her older sister Fanny Imlay, by William Godwin alone. When she was three, he married his neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, whose daughter, Claire Clairmont, less than a year younger than Mary, came to share many life experiences with her. Mary Godwin received a rich, if informal education under William Godwin, who brought her up to believe in his liberal political theories, including republicanism, radicalism, and the perfectibility of man. In 1814, despite her father's disapproval, she fell in love with the married philospher-poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of William Godwin political followers. That summer, the couple eloped to France, along with Mary's step-sister, Claire Clairmont. The three travelled through France to Switzerland and returned home along the Rhine, by which time Mary Godwin was clearly pregnant. Over the next two years, the couple experienced social ostracism, debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816 after the suicide of Percy Shelley's wife. In 1817, they spent a famous summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. In 1818, the Shelleys left Britain for Italy, where their second and third child died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence. In 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm in the Bay of Spezia. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England. Though she had offers, she never remarried. Instead, she devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The death of her father-in-law in 1844 left her financially comfortable for the first time in her life, but her last decade was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumour that killed her at the age of 53.

Until the late twentieth century, Mary Shelley was principally known for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Mary Shelley's notes to her 1839 edition of Percy Shelley's poems have also remained in print, though she has often been accused of censoring her husband's poems to soften their radicalism or atheism. Recent decades have brought a reassessment of Mary Shelley's later political views, however, and an enlarged view of her achievement and significance as a whole. Her novel Matilda, written in 1819 and 1820 and published for the first time in 1959, has become perhaps her second most popular novel. Scholars have recently shown increasing interest in Mary Shelley's literary output, particularly her novels, which include Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). Scrutiny of Mary Shelley's later works has often produced a challenge to the view that their author became conservative in her later years and abandoned the political ideals she once shared with her father and husband. Lesser-known works such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the rediscovered biographical articles for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1836–39) show that Mary Shelley remained a political radical.

Biography

Early life

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of the feminist, philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the first child of William Godwin, the English philosopher, novelist, and journalist. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever ten days after Mary was born; and Godwin was left to bring Mary up, with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's child by Gilbert Imlay.

The letters of Louisa Jones, whom Godwin employed as housekeeper and nurse, suggest that Mary's earliest years were happy ones. Jones lost her job when Mary was three years old, after Godwin's remarriage. Godwin knew he could not raise his daughters by himself and had been casting about for a second wife. In December 1801, he married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children of her own: Charles and Claire. Disliked by most of Godwin’s friends, the new Mrs Godwin was quick-tempered and quarrelled frequently with her husband; but the marriage was a success. Mary Godwin came to detest her stepmother, who Godwin's biographer Kegan Paul (1876) later suggested had favoured her own children over Mary Wollstonecraft’s.

Though Mary Godwin received little formal education, her father tutored her in a broad range of subjects; he often took the children on educational outings, and they had access to his library and to the many poets and intellectuals who visited him, including the poet Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States, Aaron Burr. Godwin admitted he was not educating the children along the lines set out by Mary Wollstonecraft, but under his guidance, Mary Godwin nonetheless received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of the time. When she was fifteen, Godwin described her as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible".

In June 1812, William Godwin sent Mary to stay with the family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee, Scotland, to whom he wrote, "I am anxious that that she should be brought up . . . like a philosopher, even like a cynic". Mary Godwin revelled in the spacious surroundings of Baxter's house and in the companionship of his four daughters, and she returned for a further stay of ten months. In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, she recalled:

I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mary Godwin may have first met the radical poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Harriet in the interval between her two stays in Scotland. By the time she returned home for a second time on 30 March 1814, Percy Shelley had become estranged from his wife and was a regular visitor to Godwin, whom he agreed to bail out of debt. Mary and Percy began meeting each other secretly at Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in St Pancras Churchyard: and they fell in love—she was nearly seventeen, he nearly twenty-two. To Mary's dismay, Godwin disapproved and did all he could to thwart the relationship and salvage the "spotless fame" of his daughter. Mary, who later wrote of "my excessive and romantic attachment to my father", was confused; she saw Percy Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of the 1790s, including opposition to ties of marriage. On 28 July 1814, the couple eloped to France, taking Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with them.

After shaking off Mrs Godwin, who had pursued them to Calais, the trio travelled to Paris and then, by donkey, mule, and carriage, through a France recently ravaged by war, to Switzerland. “It was acting in a novel,” Mary Shelley recalled in 1826, “being an incarnate romance”. They were often short of money, though Percy Shelley sold possessions and arranged loans along the way. He and Mary read works by Mary Wollstonecraft and others, kept a joint journal, and continued their own writing. Despite its hardships, the adventure was sustained by youthful love. The journey at times assumed the character of an idyll:

Journal 14th August—We rest at Vendeuve two hours. We walk in a wood belonging to a neighbouring chateau, & sleep under its shade. The moss was so soft, the murmur of the wind in the leaves was sweeter than Aeolian music . . . we forgot that we were in France or in the world for a time.

At Lucerne, lack of money forced the three to turn back. They travelled down the Rhine and by land to the Dutch port of Marsluys, arriving at Gravesend on 13 September 1814.

The situation awaiting Mary Godwin in England was fraught with complications, some of which she had not foreseen. Either before or during the continental journey, she had become pregnant. She and Percy now found themselves penniless; and, to her genuine surprise, William Godwin refused to have anything to do with them. The couple moved with Claire into lodgings at Somers Town, and later, Nelson Square, where they maintained their intense programme of reading and writing and entertained Percy Shelley's friends, such as Thomas Jefferson Hogg and the writer Thomas Love Peacock. Percy Shelley sometimes went on the run to dodge creditors. On these occasions, the couple were distraught to be separated, as their letters to each other reveal.

Pregnant and often ill, Mary Godwin had to cope with Percy's joy at the birth of his son by Harriet Shelley in late 1814 and with his constant outings with Claire Clairmont. She was partly consoled by the visits of Hogg, whose companionship she warmed to, and who helped the couple with money. Percy Shelley seems to have wanted Mary Shelley and Hogg to become lovers, an idea that Mary did not dismiss, since in principle she believed in free love; but she loved only Percy Shelley and seems to have gone no further than flirting with Hogg. On 22 February 1815, she gave birth to a two-months premature baby girl, given little chance of survival. On 6 March, she wrote to Hogg:

My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now.

The loss induced an acute depression in Mary Godwin, who was haunted by visions of her baby; but she fell pregnant again and had recovered by the summer. After a revival in Percy Shelley's finances after the death of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, the couple holidayed in Torquay and then rented a two-storey cottage at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Little is known about this period in Mary Godwin's life, since her journal from May 1815 to July 1816 is lost. At Bishopsgate, Percy Shelley wrote his poem Alastor; and Mary Godwin gave birth there to a second child, William, on 24 January 1816.

Lake Geneva and Frankenstein

In May 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son travelled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont. They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant. The party arrived at Geneva on 14 May 1816, where Mary called herself "Mrs Shelley", and Byron joined them on 25 May, with his young physician, John William Polidori. Byron rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny, and Percy Shelley a smaller building called Maison Chapuis, a vineyard away, on the waterfront. They spent their time in writing, boating on the lake, and talking into the small hours.

"It proved a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house". Amongst other subjects, the conversation turned to the experiments of Erasmus Darwin, who was said to have animated dead matter, and to galvanism and the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts to life. Sitting round a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amused themselves by reading German ghost stories, prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own supernatural tale. Shortly afterwards, in a waking dream, Mary Godwin conceived the idea for Frankenstein and began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale as her first novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life".

Bath and Marlow

On their return to England in September, Mary and Percy moved—with Claire Clairmont, who took lodgings nearby—to Bath, where they hoped to keep Claire’s pregnancy secret. At Cologny, Mary Godwin had received two letters from her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, who alluded to her "unhappy life"; on 9 October, Fanny wrote an "alarming letter" from Bristol, which sent Percy Shelley racing off to search for her, without success. On the morning of 10 October, Fanny Imlay was found dead in a room at a Swansea inn, along with a suicide note and a laudanum bottle. On 10 December, the heavily pregnant body of Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet, was retrieved from the Serpentine, a lake in Hyde Park, London. Both suicides were hushed up. Harriet’s family obstructed Percy Shelley's efforts—supported wholeheartedly by Mary Godwin—to assume custody of his two children by Harriet. His lawyers advised him to improve his case by marrying; so he and Mary, who was pregnant again, married on 30 December 1816 at St Mildred's Church, Bread Street, London. Mr and Mrs Godwin were present; the marriage ended the family rift.

Claire Clairmont gave birth to a baby girl in January, at first called Alba, later Allegra. In March that year, the Chancery Court denied Percy Shelley custody of his children on the grounds of his moral unfitness and later placed them with a clergyman's family. Also in March, the Shelleys moved with Claire and Alba to a large, damp house at Marlow, Buckinghamshire, on the river Thames, where Mary Shelley gave birth to her third child, Clara, on 2 September. At Marlow, they entertained their new friends Marianne and James Leigh Hunt, worked diligently on their writing, and often discussed politics. Since returning from Switzerland, mary Godwin had been working on Frankenstein, which she finished in early summer 1817: it was published anonymously in January 1818. At Marlow, she edited the continental journal of 1814, adding material written in Switzerland in 1816, into the History of a Six Weeks' Tour, published in November 1817. That autumn, Percy Shelley often lived away from home in London, to evade creditors. The threat of a debtor's prison, combined with their ill health and fears of losing custody of their children, contributed to the couple's decision to leave England for Italy on 12 March 1818, taking Claire Clairmont and Alba with them. They had no intention of coming back.

Italy

One of the party's first tasks on arriving in Italy was to hand Alba over to Byron, who was living at Venice. He had agreed to bring her up so long as Claire had nothing more to do with her; The Shelleys then embarked on a roving existence, never settling in any one place in Italy. Along the way, they accumulated a circle of friends and acquaintances who often moved with them. The couple devoted their time to writing, reading, learning, sightseeing, and socialising. The Italian adventure was, however, blighted for Mary Shelley by the deaths of both her children—Clara, in September 1818 at Venice, and William, in June 1819 at Rome. These bereavements left her in a deep depression that isolated her from Percy Shelley, who wrote in his notebook:

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee
Do thou return for mine.

For a time, Mary Shelley found solace only in her writing. The birth of her fourth child, Percy Florence, on 12 November 1819, finally lifted her spirits, though she nursed the memory of her lost children till the end of her life.

Italy provided the Shelleys, Byron, and other exiles with a political freedom unattainable at home. Despite its associations with personal loss, it became for Mary Shelley "a country which memory painted as paradise". Their Italian years were a time of intense intellectual and creative activity for both Shelleys. While Percy composed a series of major poems, Mary wrote the novels Matilda and Valperga and the plays Proserpine and Midas. She was often physically ill, however, and subject to depressions. She also had to cope with Percy Shelley’s interest in other women, such as Sophia Stacey, Emilia Viviani, and Jane Williams. Since Mary Shelley shared his belief in the non-exclusivity of marriage, she formed emotional ties of her own among the men and women of their circle. She became particularly fond of the Greek revolutionary Prince Alexander Mavrocordato and of Jane and Edward Williams.

In December 1818, the Shelleys travelled south with Claire Clairmont and their servants to Naples, where they stayed for three months, receiving no visitors. In 1820, they found themselves plagued by accusations and threats from Paolo and Elise Foggi, former servants whom Percy Shelley had dismissed in Naples shortly after they married. The pair revealed that on 27 February 1819 in Naples, Percy Shelley had registered, as his child by his wife, a two-month-old baby girl called Elena Adelaide Shelley. The Foggis also claimed, without proof, that the baby's mother was Claire Clairmont. Commentators suggest various possibilities: that Percy Shelley decided to adopt a local child; that the baby was his by Elise, Claire, or a woman unknown; or that she was Elise’s by Byron. Mary Shelley insisted she would have known if Claire had been pregnant, but it is unclear how much she did know. The events in Naples, a city Mary Shelley later called a paradise inhabited by devils, remain shrouded in mystery. The only certainty is that she herself was not the child’s mother. Elena Adelaide Shelley died in Naples on 9 June 1820.

In summer 1822, a pregnant Mary moved with Percy, Claire, and Edward and Jane Williams to the isolated Casa Magni, at the sea's edge near the hamlet of San Terenzo in the Bay of Lerici. Once they were settled in, Percy broke the "evil news" to Claire that her daughter Allegra had died of typhus in the convent at Bagnacavallo. Mary Shelley was distracted and unhappy in the cramped Casa Magni, which she came to regard as a dungeon. The remoteness of the building, a converted boathouse, was to have dangerous consequences. On 16 June, she miscarried and lost so much blood that her life was in danger. Rather than wait a long time for a doctor, Percy Shelley sat her in a tin hip bath of ice to staunch the bleeding, an act the doctor later told him saved her life. All was not well between the couple that summer, however, and Percy Shelley gave more attention to Jane Williams than to his pregnant and then debilitated wife.

The coast offered Percy Shelley and Edward Williams the chance to enjoy their "perfect plaything for the summer", a new sailing boat, which Percy called the "Don Juan", after the hero of Lord Byron’s poem. On 1 July, Percy Shelley, Edward Williams, and Captain Daniel Roberts sailed south down the coast to Livorno. There Percy Shelley discussed the launch of a radical magazine called The Liberal with Byron and Leigh Hunt. On 8 July, he and Edward Williams set out on the return journey to Lerici with their eighteen-year-old boatboy, Charles Vivian. They never reached their destination. A letter arrived at Casa Magni from Hunt to Percy Shelley, dated 8 July, saying, "pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed monday & we are anxious". "The paper fell from me," Mary told a friend later. "I trembled all over". She and Jane Williams rushed desperately to Livorno and then to Pisa, in the fading hope that their men were still alive. Ten days after the storm, three bodies were washed up on the coast near Viareggio, mid-way between Livorno and Lerici. Trelawny, Byron and Hunt cremated Percy Shelley’s corpse on the beach at Viareggio.

Return to England

After her husband's death, Mary Shelley lived for a year with Leigh Hunt and his family in Genoa, where she often saw Byron and transcribed his poems. She decided to live by her pen and for her son, but her financial situation was precarious. On 23 July 1823, she left Genoa for England and stayed with her father and stepmother in the Strand until a small advance from her father-in-law enabled her to lodge nearby. Sir Timothy Shelley had at first agreed to support his grandson, Percy Florence, only if he were handed over to an appointed guardian. Mary Shelley rejected this instantly. She managed instead to wring out of Sir Timothy a limited and repayable allowance, but to the end of his days he refused to meet her in person and conducted his dealings with her through lawyers. Mary Shelley busied herself, among other literary tasks, with editing her husband's poems, but concern for her son restricted her freedom. Sir Timothy Shelley threatened to stop Percy Florence's allowance should any biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley be published. Mary Shelley enjoyed the stimulating society of William Godwin's circle, but poverty prevented her from socialising as widely as she wished. She also felt herself cast out by those elements in society who, like Sir Timothy, disapproved of her elopement and relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In summer 1824, Mary Shelley moved to Kentish Town in north London to be near Jane Williams. She may have been, in the words of her biographer Muriel Spark, "a little in love" with Jane, who later disillusioned her by spreading hurtful gossip about her adequacy as a wife to Percy Shelley. At around this time, Mary Shelley was working on her novel, The Last Man (1826). She also met the American actor John Howard Payne and the American writer Washington Irving. Payne fell in love with her, and in summer 1826 asked her to marry him. She refused, saying that after being married to one genius, she could only marry another. Payne therefore tried without success to talk his friend Irving into proposing in his place. Mary Shelley was aware of Payne's endeavours, but how seriously she took them is not clear. In 1827, Mary Shelley was party to a scheme whereby her friend Isabel Robinson and Isabel's lover, Maria Mary Dods, who wrote under the name David Lyndsay, were enabled to adopt a life together in France as man and wife. With the help of Payne, whom she kept in the dark about the details, Mary Shelley obtained false passports for the couple, at considerable risk to her own reputation.

During the period 1827–40, Mary Shelley was busy as an editor and writer. She wrote the novels, Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). She also contributed five volumes of Lives to Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia and edited Percy Bysshe Shelley's Poetical Works (1838). She continued to treat potential romantic partners with caution. In 1828, she met and flirted with the French writer Prosper Mérimée, and her one surviving letter to him appears to be a deflection of his declaration of love. She was delighted when her old friend from Italy, Edward Trelawny, returned to England; in subsequent letters, he too talked of marriage, but she ruled it out. Their friendship had altered, however, when she refused to cooperate with his proposed biography of Percy Shelley; and he later reacted angrily when she omitted the atheistic section of Queen Mab from Percy Shelley's poems. Oblique references in her journals, from the early 1830s until the early 1840s, suggest that Mary Shelley had feelings for the radical politician Aubrey Beauclerk, who may have disappointed her by twice marrying others.

Mary Shelley's first concern during these years was the welfare of her son, Percy Florence. She honoured her late husband's wish that his son attend public school, and, with Sir Timothy's grudging help, had him educated at Harrow. To avoid boarding fees, she moved to Harrow on the Hill herself so that Percy could attend as a day scholar. Though Percy went on to Cambridge University and dabbled in politics and the law, he showed no sign of his parents' gifts. However, he was devoted to his mother, and after he left the university in 1841, he came to live with her.

Final years and death

Mother and son travelled together on the continent, journeys that Mary Shelley recorded in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844). In 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died at the age of ninety, "falling from the stalk like an overblown flower", as Mary put it. For the first time, she and her son were financially independent, though the estate proved less valuable than they had hoped.

In the mid 1840s, Mary Shelley was the target of a series of blackmailers. In Paris, she met a dashing Italian political exile and writer called Ferdinand Gatteschi, to whom she gave money and wrote unguarded letters. In 1845, Gatteschi used these letters in an attempt to blackmail her. Mary Shelley wrote to Claire Clairmont, "I am indeed humbled—& feel all my vanity & folly & pride—my credulity I can forgive but not my total want of common sense". Her son's friend, lawyer Alexander Knox, came to the rescue. He set off for Paris, where he bribed a police chief into seizing Gatteschi's papers, including the letters in question. Two weeks later, a forger calling himself G. Byron and posing as the illegitimate son of the late Lord Byron, contacted Mary Shelley offering to sell her letters written by herself and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary Shelley negotiated the purchase of some of them through her late husband's friend Thomas Hookham. Two years later, G. Byron resurfaced with more demands, threatening to release copies of the letters he had handed over. After further exchanges with Hookham, however, nothing more was heard from him. In 1845, Percy Bysshe Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin, once part of the Shelley circle in Italy, approached Mary Shelley claiming to have written a damaging biography of Percy Shelley that he was willing to suppress in return for £250, which he said was the price offered by a publisher. The threat caused Mary Shelley much anxiety, but she refused to give in to Medwin. "An attempt to extort money finds me quite hardened, " she told Hunt. "I have suffered too much from things of this kind.

In 1848, Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John, and the marriage was a happy one. Mary Shelley and Jane were fond of each other, and Mary lived with her son and daughter-in-law at Field Place, Sussex, the Shelleys' ancestral home, and at Chester Square, London, and accompanied them on travels abroad.

Mary Shelley's last years were, however, blighted by illness. From 1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing. On 1 February 1851, at Chester Square, she died of a suspected brain tumour at the age of fifty-three.

According to Jane Shelley, Mary Shelley had asked to be buried with her mother and father; but Percy and Jane, considering the graveyard at St Pancras to be "dreadful", chose to bury her instead at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, near their new home at Boscombe. In order to fulfil Mary Shelley's wishes, they had the coffins of her parents exhumed and buried with her in Bournemouth. On the first anniversary of Mary Shelley's death, the Shelleys opened her box-desk. Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his Adonaïs with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart.

Literary life

By the time she met Percy Shelley in 1814, Mary Godwin was already primed for a literary life. Her father had encouraged her to learn to write by writing letters., and her favourite occupation as a child was writing stories. Her first published work is often thought to have been Mounseer Nongtongpaw, comic verses written for Godwin's publishing company when she was ten and a half, though the attribution has been questioned. Visitor Aaron Burr noted in his journal an occasion on which Mary Shelley wrote a speech for her eight-year-old brother William to deliver in the family schoolroom. Percy Shelley vigorously encouraged Mary Shelley's early writing. She wrote later: "My husband was, from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary reputation".

When they eloped to France in summer 1814, Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley wrote a joint journal, which they published in 1817 under the title History of a Six Weeks' Tour, adding four letters, two by each of them, based on their visit to Geneva in 1816, and Percy Shelley's poem "Mont Blanc". The work celebrates youthful love and political idealism and consciously follows the example of Mary Wollstonecraft and others who had reinvented the tradition of the continental Grand Tour. The perspective of the History is philosophical and reformist rather than that of a conventional travelogue; in particular, it addresses the effects of politics and war on France. The letters the couple wrote on the second journey confront the "great and extraordinary events" of the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo after his "Hundred Days" return in 1815. They explore the sublimity of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc as well as the revolutionary legacy of the philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was published on 1 January 1818, in a small run of five hundred copies. The novel had its origins on a rainy night in June 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, when Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori agreed to each write a story in imitation of the German ghost stories they were reading. Mary Shelley produced the most enduring response, her novel Frankenstein. Mary Shelley recalled in 1831 that after discussions about galvanism and the feasibility of generating human life, the vision of her "hideous progeny" had come to her in a waking dream:

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world".

There is speculation that this was based on work by Andrew Crosse of Fyne Court, Broomfield, Somerset who carried out early experiments passing an electrical current through a chemical solution in an attempt to induce crystal formation. On the 26th day of the experiment he saw what he described as "the perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail" probably from contaminated instruments.

The novel's central story is narrated to the Arctic explorer Captain Walton by Victor Frankenstein, who is pursuing across the frozen sea a nameless creature he has manufactured from the "lifeless matter" of corpses. Frankenstein relates how, after his creature came to life, he fled in disgust, allowing the "miserable monster" to get loose. After the creature has killed Frankenstein's brother, Frankenstein confronts him in the Alps, where the creature narrates his experiences and explains how he turned from a natural life of goodness to a life of evil: "I was benevolent and good," he says; "misery made me a fiend". In return for the creature's promise to leave Europe forever, Frankenstein agrees to make a female companion for him; but he later destroys his unfinished work in fit of disgust. The creature, who now stalks Frankenstein's every move, murders Frankenstein's best friend, Clerval, and then his bride, Elizabeth. Bent on destroying the creature, Frankenstein pursues him to the Arctic, and is picked up, frozen and exhausted, by Captain Walton. After narrating his story, he dies in his cabin. The creature appears and hangs, wailing with grief, over Frankenstein's coffin. Vowing to kill himself in turn, he departs on his ice-raft to build his own funeral pyre.

Frankenstein, like many works of its period, mixes a visceral and alienating subject matter with speculative and thought-provoking themes. Mary Shelley adopts elements of the Gothic genre of mystery and horror, but, rather than plot conventions, she foregrounds the mental and moral struggles of the leading character, Victor Frankenstein, and imbues the text with her own brand of politicised Romanticism. The novel has always provoked multiple, often conflicting, interpretations. In the view of critic and editor Betty T. Bennett, however, these interpretations commonly acknowledge Mary Shelley's "consistent, larger metaphoric question of the exercise of power and responsibility, personal and societal". Some critics have seen the novel as a warning against scientific interference with nature, or against man's pretension to godlike power. Mary Shelley believed, like her parents and her husband, in the Enlightenment idea that man could improve society through the responsible exercise of political power, but that irresponsible use of power led to chaos. Unlike Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein creates his creature not on behalf of humanity but for his own selfish reasons, without thought of the social consequences. Reading the first edition of Frankenstein as part of a larger pattern in Shelley's writing, which begins with literary self-assertion and ends with conventional femininity, Mary Poovey argues that these same "competing impulses" are already present in Shelley's earliest novel. Poovey sees in Frankenstein's multiple narratives an opportunity for Shelley to split her artistic persona, she can "express and efface herself at the same time". Shelley's own fears of self-assertion are reflected in the character of Frankenstein, who is punished for his egotism by losing all of his domestic ties.

The anonymous first edition of Frankenstein received reviews that ranged from hostility to appreciation, alerted by the dedication to William Godwin and by Percy Shelley's preface. The novel won approval among Mary Shelley's literary circle, and was republished under her own name in 1823, edited by her father. In 1831, when the novel was published in a third edition for Colburn and Bentley's Standard Novels Series, Shelley herself made substantial revisions to the text. Frankenstein has now entered the public imagination, popularised at first by Richard Brinsley Peake's adaptation for the stage in 1823. The subsequent fame of Frankenstein has spawned its own mythology: the creature is regularly invoked, often inaccurately, in diverse non-literary contexts.

Matilda, Valperga, and The Last Man

Between August 1819 and February 1820, Mary Shelley wrote her short novel Matilda, on the common Romantic themes of incest and suicide. Narrating from her deathbed, the romantic heroine Matilda recounts her unnamed father's confession of his incestuous love for her, followed by his suicide by drowning; her relationship with a gifted young poet called Woodville fails to reverse Matilda's emotional withdrawal or prevent her lonely death. Commentators often read the text as autobiographical, the three central characters standing for William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley. Critic Pamela Clemit, however, resists a purely autobiographical reading, contesting that Matilda is an artfully crafted novel in the style of William Godwin, deploying confessional and unreliable narrations, as well as Godwin's device of the pursuit. The novel's first editor, Elizabeth Nitchie, noted its faults of "verbosity, loose plotting, somewhat stereotyped and extravagant characterization" but praised a "feeling for character and situation and phrasing that is often vigorous and precise".

Mary Shelley sent the finished novel to her father in England, to submit for publication. However, though Godwin admired aspects of the work, he found the incest theme "disgusting and detestable" and failed to return the manuscript despite his daughter's repeated requests. Matilda was finally published in 1959, edited by Elizabeth Nitchie from dispersed papers. It has become perhaps Mary Shelley's best-known work after Frankenstein.

Godwin was of more assistance with Mary Shelley's next novel, Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, which she sent him in late 1821; he edited and shortened it and arranged for its publication in February 1823. This historical novel relates the adventures of the early-fourteenth-century despot Castruccio Castracani, a real historical figure who became the lord of Lucca and conquered Florence. In the novel, his armies threaten the fictional fortress of Valperga, governed by Countess Euthanasia, the woman he loves. He forces her to choose between her feelings for him and political liberty. She chooses the latter and sails off to her death.

Valperga earned largely positive reviews, but most contemporary critics judged it as a love story and failed to notice its ideological framework. Through the perspective of medieval history, Mary Shelley addresses a major issue in post-Napoleonic Europe, the right of autonomously governed communities to political liberty in defiance of imperialistic powers. At the same time, she opposes Castruccio's compulsive greed for conquest with a female alternative, Euthanasia's government of Valperga on the principles of reason and sensibility. In the view of Valperga's recent editor Stuart Curran, the work represents a "feminist recasting of Scott's masculinist historical novel". Modern critics draw attention to Mary Shelley's republicanism, and her interest in questions of political power and moral principles. Valperga has also been praised for its sophisticated narrative form and its authenticity of detail. It was not, however, republished in Mary Shelley's lifetime, and she later remarked that it never had "fair play".

After Valperga, Mary Shelley wrote two dramas, Proserpine and Midas, possibly for a young audience, and a short story, Maurice, for the eleven-year-old daughter of a friend. The death of Percy Shelley in Summer 1822, however, made it necessary for her to earn a reliable income as a professional writer. From this time, she took jobbing work as an editor and regularly wrote essays, travel pieces, and reviews for publication. She also often contributed short stories for gift books or annuals, including sixteen for The Keepsake, which was aimed at middle-class women and bound in silk, with gilt-edged pages. In this field, Mary Shelley has been described as a "hack writer", and "wordy and pedestrian". Critic Charlotte Sussman, however, points out that other leading writers of the day took advantage of this profitable market. Mary Shelley always saw herself, above all, as a novelist. She wrote to Hunt, "I write bad articles which help to make me miserable—but I am going to plunge into a novel and hope that its clear water will wash off the mud of the magazines".

The novel Mary Shelley had in mind, with a "vivid conception of the story", was The Last Man, which was published in 1826. Set in a republican Britain in the twenty-first century, the novel is a futuristic fable of the end of human civilisation. It follows the political and emotional adventures of a small group of characters, a "happy circle", who are killed off one by one as a lethal plague sweeps across Europe, until only one man remains, wandering a deserted Rome. Mary Shelley modelled the central characters on her Italian circle: Lord Raymond, for example, who leaves England to fight for the Greeks and dies in Constantinople, is based on Lord Byron; and the utopian Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who leads his followers in search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm, is a fictional portrait of Percy Shelley. The novel not only expresses Mary Shelley's pain at the loss of her community of the "Elect", as she called them, but it questions the Romantic political ideals they stood for. In a sense, the plague is metaphorical, since the revolutionary idyll of the élite group is corroded from within by flaws of human nature.

The Last Man received the worst reviews of all Mary Shelley's novels: most reviewers derided the very theme of the last man, which had become a common one in the previous two decades. Individual reviewers labelled the book "sickening", criticised its "stupid cruelties", and called the author's imagination "diseased". The reaction startled Mary Shelley, who promised her publisher that her next book would be more popular. Nonetheless, she later spoke of The Last Man as one of her favourite works. The novel was not republished in England until the twentieth century, when it received increased critical attention, perhaps because the notion of "lastness" had become more relevant. Today many critics regard The Last Man as Mary Shelley's second-best novel.

Perkin Warbeck, Lodore, and Falkner

In her next novel, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, published in 1830, Mary Shelley returned to The Last Man's message that an idealistic political system is impossible without an improvement in human nature. This historical novel, influenced by those of Sir Walter Scott, fictionalises the exploits of Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the throne of King Henry VII who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, the second son of King Edward IV. Mary Shelley believed that Warbeck really was Richard and had escaped from the Tower of London. She endows his character with elements of Percy Shelley, portraying him sympathetically as "an angelic essence, incapable of wound", who is led by his sensibility onto the political stage. She seems to have identified herself with Richard's wife, Lady Katherine Gordon, who survives after her husband's death by making accommodation with her husband's political enemies. Lady Gordon stands for the values of friendship, domesticity and equality; through her, Mary Shelley offers a female alternative to the masculine power politics that destroy Richard. Perkin Warbeck was generally well received; the Edinburgh Literary Journal's critic, for example, said it bore "the stamp of a powerful mind". The novel is not, however, regarded as one of Mary Shelley's most important. The character of Lady Gordon has been called "pathetic in her hand-wringing ineffectuality". The political contradictions of the novel have also been noted, as well as its uneasy mix of the influences of Scott and the Jacobean playwright John Ford.

Mary Shelley's last two novels, Lodore and Falkner have contemporary settings. In Lodore, published in 1835, Shelley focused her theme of power and responsibility on the microcosm of the family. The central story follows the fortunes of the wife and daughter of the title character, Lord Lodore, who is killed in a duel at the end of the first volume, leaving a trail of legal, financial and familial obstacles for the two "heroines" to negotiate. Mary Shelley places female characters at the centre of the ensuing narratives: Lodore's daughter, Ethel, raised to be over-dependent on paternal control; his estranged wife, Cornelia, preoccupied with the norms and appearances of aristocratic society; and the intellectual and independent Fanny Derham, with whom both are contrasted.

Lodore was a success with the reviewers: Fraser's Magazine praised its "depth and sweep of thought", for example; and it prompted The Literary Gazette to call Mary Shelley "one of the most original of our modern writers". Later nineteenth-century critics were more dubious: in 1886, Edward Dowden called Lodore "biography transmuted for the purposes of fiction"; in 1889, Florence Marshall remarked that Lodore was "written in a style that is now out of date". The case for the novel has been taken up recently by, among others, its editor Lisa Vargo, who notes its engagement with political and ideological issues, particularly the education and social role of women. She suggests that Lodore dissects a patriarchal culture that separated the sexes and pressured women into dependence on men. In the view of critic Betty T. Bennett, "the novel proposes egalitarian educational paradigms for women and men, which would bring social justice as well as the spiritual and intellectual means by which to meet the challenges life invariably brings".

In her last novel, Falkner, published in 1837, Mary Shelley again traced a young woman's education under a tyrannical father figure. As a six-year-old orphan, Elizabeth Raby prevents Rupert Falkner from committing suicide; Falkner then adopts her and brings her up to be a model of virtue. However, she falls in love with Gerald Neville, whose history is entwined with that of Falkner, who long before had unintentionally driven Neville's mother to her death. When Falkner is finally acquitted of murdering Neville's mother, Elizabeth's female values subdue the destructive impulses of the two men she loves, who are reconciled and unite with Elizabeth in domestic harmony. Falkner is the only one of Mary Shelley's novels in which the heroine's agenda is victorious. In critic Kate Ferguson Ellis's view, the resolution proposes that when female values triumph over violent and destructive masculinity, men will be freed to express the "compassion, sympathy, and generosity" of their better natures.

Critics have until recently cited Lodore and Falkner as evidence of a conservative retrenchment by Mary Shelley. In 1984, Mary Poovey identified Shelley's retreat into the code of the "Proper Lady", and a restriction of her reformist politics to the "separate sphere" of the domestic. As with Lodore, contemporary critics reviewed the novel as a romance, overlooking its political subtext and noting its moral issues as purely familial. Bennett argues, however, that Falkner is as concerned with power and political responsibility as Mary Shelley's previous novels. Poovey suggested that Mary Shelley wrote Falkner to resolve her conflicted response to her father's combination of libertarian radicalism and stern insistence that she act with social decorum. Critics neither view Falkner as notably feminist, nor as one of Mary Shelley's strongest novels, though she herself believed it could be her best. The novel has been criticised for its two-dimensional characterisation. In Bennett's view, "Lodore and Falkner represent fusions of the psychological social novel with the educational novel, resulting not in romances but instead in narratives of destabilization: the heroic protagonists are educated women who strive to create a world of justice and universal love".

Non-fiction

Mary Shelley's last full-length book was Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843, written in the form of letters and published in 1843, which recorded her travels with her son Percy Florence and his university friends. In the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and her own A History of a Six Weeks' Tour, Shelley maps her personal and political landscape in Rambles. Between observations on scenery, culture, and "the people, especially in a political point of view", she uses the travelogue form to explore her roles as a widow and mother and reflect on revolutionary nationalism in Italy. She also records her "pilgrimage" to scenes associated with Percy Shelley, in "a country which memory painted as paradise". According to critic Clarissa Orr, Mary Shelley's adoption of a persona of philosophical motherhood gives Rambles the unity of a prose poem, with "death and memory as central themes". At the same time, Shelley makes an egalitarian case against monarchy, class distinctions, slavery, and war.

Between 1832 and 1839, Mary Shelley also wrote many biographical essays for five volumes of Dionysius Lardner's Lives, part of his Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Until the republication of these essays in 2002, their significance in Shelley's career was not appreciated. They reveal not only that she produced far more of these lives of famous Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French writers and scientists than previously thought, but also a radicalism and an alertness to historical gender issues which belie the once-accepted notion that she became politically conservative as she grew older.

Editor

Mary Shelley had planned to write a biography of Percy Shelley, soon after his death. However, her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, had effectively banned her from doing so. While she was working on the Lives, Mary Shelley prepared a new edition of Percy Shelley's prose and poetry: published in 1839, her edition was, as Wolfson puts it, "the canonizing event" in the history of her husband's reputation. Mary Shelley evaded Sir Timothy Shelley's ban on a biography of his son by including her own annotations and personal reflections on her husband's life and work. Her determined efforts to make Percy Shelley "beloved to all posterity" continued during the 1840s, as she added many unpublished poems and fragments to the canon.

Despite the emotional stress of this work, Mary Shelley proved herself a professional and scholarly editor. However, she faced restrictions that led to compromise. In principle, she believed in publishing every last word of her husband's work, but she found herself obliged to omit certain passages, either by pressure from her publisher, Edward Moxon, or in deference to public propriety. Her omissions led to criticism, often stinging, from members of Percy Shelley's former circle, particularly from Edward Trelawny, who objected to her excision of the atheistic sections from Queen Mab, and from Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who wrote her an "insulting letter" concerning her failure to include Percy Shelley's dedicatory poem to his first wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley. Reviewers accused Mary Shelley, among other things, of the "emasculation" of Queen Mab and of indiscriminate inclusions. Despite their troubled reception, her notes have remained an essential source for the study of Percy Shelley's work, with which they have often been reprinted.

List of works

  • Mounseer Nongtongpaw; or, The Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris, Juvenile Library, 1808
  • History of Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters Descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni, with contributions by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hookham, 1817
  • Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (novel), three volumes, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818, revised edition, one volume, Colburn & Bentley, 1831, two volumes, Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1833
  • Mathilda (1819 novel), edited by Elizabeth Nitchie, University of North Carolina Press, 1959
  • Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (novel), three volumes, Whittaker, 1823.
  • Editor of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hunt, 1824
  • The Last Man (novel), three volumes, Colburn, 1826, two volumes, Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1833
  • The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (novel), three volumes, Colburn & Bentley, 1830, two volumes, Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1834
  • Lodore (novel), three volumes, Bentley, 1835, one volume, Wallis & Newell, 1835
  • Falkner (novel) three volumes, Saunders & Otley, 1837, one volume, Harper & Brothers, 1837
  • Editor of P. B. Shelley, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, four volumes, Moxon, 1839
  • Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, two volumes, Moxon, 1844
  • The Choice: A Poem on Shelley's Death, edited by H. Buxton Forman, [London], 1876
  • The Mortal Immortal (short story), Mossant, Vallon, 1910
  • Proserpine and Midas: Two Unpublished Mythological Dramas, edited by A. Koszul, Milford, 1922
  • Contributor to Volumes 86-88 and 102-103 in The Cabinet of Biography, Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia, 1835-1839
  • Contributor of stories, reviews, and essays for London Magazine, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Examiner, and Westminster Review
  • Contributor of stories to an annual gift book, The Keepsake, 1828-1838
  • Collections of Mary Shelley's works are housed in Lord Abinger's Shelley Collection on deposit at the Bodleian Library, the New York Public Library, the Huntington Library, the British Library, and in the John Murray Collection
  • Excluding many collections, such as Mary and Shelley's journals and letters
  • The Bride of Modern Italy (?)
  • The Dream (?)
  • Ferdinando Eboli (?)
  • The Invisible Girl (?)
  • Roger Dodsworth:The Reanimated Englishman (1826)
  • The Sisters of Albano (?)
  • The Transformation (?)

See also

Notes

Bibliography

  • Bennett, Betty T., ed. Mary Shelley in her Times. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University press, 2003. ISBN 0801877334.
  • Bennett, Betty T. "Mary Shelley's letters: the public/private self." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Bennett, Betty T. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN 080185976X.
  • Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Reknown, 1816–1822. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. ISBN 0874138930.
  • Brewer, William D. "William Godwin, Chivalry, and Mary Shelley's The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck." Papers on Language and Literature, 35.2 (Spring 1999): 187-205. Online transcript at BNET (retrieved 20 February 2008.)
  • Bunnell, Charlene E. "All the World's a Stage": Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley's Novels. New York: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0415938635.
  • Carlson, J. A. England's First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ISBN 080188618X.
  • Clemit, Pamela. "Frankenstein, Matilda, and the legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Clemit, Pamela. "From The Fields of Fancy to Matilda." Mary Shelley in her Times. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University press, 2003. ISBN 0801877334.
  • Conger, Syndy M., Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea, eds. Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein". Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. ISBN 0836836845.
  • Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, ed. Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner. New York: St. Martin's Press/Palgrave, 2000. ISBN 0333771060.
  • Ellis, Kate Ferguson. "Falkner and other fictions." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Frank, Frederick S. "Mary Shelley's Other Fictions: A Bibliographic Consensus." Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein". Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth. Ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. ISBN 0836836845.
  • Gittings, Robert, and Jo Manton. Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ISBN 0198185944.
  • Hoeveler, Diane Long. "Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. 1974. London: Harper Perennial, 2003. ISBN 0007204582.
  • Jump, Harriet Devine, Pamela Clemit, and Betty T. Bennett, eds. Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley by Their Contemporaries. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999. ISBN 1851965122.
  • Kucich, Greg. "Biographer." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Lokke, Kari E. "The Last Man." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Lynch, Deidre. "Historical novelist." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Mellor, Anne K. "Making a 'monster': an introduction to Frankenstein." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Mellor, Anne K. ''Mary Shelley: Her Life, her Fiction, Her Monsters. London: Routledge, 1990. ISBN 0415901472.
  • Moskal, Jeanne. "Travel writing." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Orr, Clarissa Campbell. "Mary Shelley's Rambles in Germany and Italy, the Celebrity Author, and the Undiscovered Country of the Human Heart." Romanticism On the Net, 11 August 1998 (retrieved 22 February 2008).
  • Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985. ISBN 0226675289.
  • Schor, Esther, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Schor, Esther. "Frankenstein and film." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. London: John Murray, 2000. ISBN 0719557119.
  • Shelley, Mary. Collected Tales and Stories. Ed. Charles E. Robinson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801817064.
  • Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Ed. Maurice Hindle. London: Penguin, 2003. ISBN 0141439475.
  • Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. ISBN 0321399536.
  • Shelley, Mary. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-44. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ISBN 0801850886.
  • Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Ed. Pamela Bickley. Ware, Herts: Wordsworth, 2004. ISBN 1840224037.
  • Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Ed. Morton D. Paley. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998. ISBN 0192838652.
  • Shelley, Mary. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. 3 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–83.
  • Shelley, Mary. Lodore. Ed. Lisa Vargo. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997. ISBN 1551110776.
  • Shelley, Mary. Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and Other Writings. 4 vols. Ed. Nora Crook. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002. ISBN 1851967168.
  • Shelley, Mary. Mathilda. Ed. Elizabeth Nitchie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959. OCLC 249434. Gutenberg copy, retrieved 16 February 2008.
  • Shelley, Mary. Matilda; with Mary and Maria, by Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd. London: Penguin, 1992. ISBN 0140433716.
  • Shelley, Mary. Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ISBN 0801848865.
  • Shelley, Mary. Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca. Ed. Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0195108825.
  • Shelley, Mary. Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca. Ed. Michael Rossington. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2000. ISBN 0192832891.
  • Sites, Melissa. "Re/membering Home: Utopian Domesticity in Mary Shelley's Lodore." A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle's Utopian Project. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. Ed. Darby Lewes. ISBN 0739104721.
  • Spark, Muriel. Mary Shelley. London: Cardinal, 1987. ISBN 074740138X.
  • St Clair, William. The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. ISBN 0571154220.
  • Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. 1989. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. ISBN 0801842182.
  • Sussman, Charlotte. "Stories for the Keepsake." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
  • Wake, Ann M Frank. "Women in the Active Voice: Recovering Female History in Mary Shelley's Valperga and Perkin Warbeck." Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein". Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth. Ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. ISBN 0836836845.
  • White, Daniel E. "'The god undeified': Mary Shelley's Valperga, Italy, and the Aesthetic of Desire." Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner. Ed. Michael Eberle-Sinatra. New York: St. Martin's Press/Palgrave, 2000. ISBN 0333771060. Online transcript at Romanticism On the Net (retrieved 22 February 2008).
  • Wolfson, Susan J. "Mary Shelley, editor." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.

External links



Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 19:35:49 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation