Mary Shelley [Paperback]

In some ways, she could hardly fail. Daughter of William Godwin (An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice) and Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley had literary radicalism in her blood and her bed. Inspired by a stormy night of ghost stories on Lake Geneva, where she, her husband, Byron and John Polidori were staying, Frankenstein the story was born, or given life, telling of love, rejection, and promethean ambition. Later in life she would talk of it as her "hideous progeny", and invite it to "go forth and prosper". By then it already had, its lifeblood drained by the vampiric attentions of the stage, as it would later be by the screen. And 18-year-old Mary still had the rest of her life to lead. Miranda Seymour convincingly supplants the monstrous legend with its creator, negotiating what she refers to as the "biographer's sandpit" of the novel, and its post-publication revisionism. After Shelley's death by drowning, Mary continued to write modestly received novels such as The Last Man and the despairingly autobiographical Mathilda, as well as short stories for ladies' annuals, to support her impoverished father, and stolidly devoted son. She was also, controversially, the keeper of Shelley's flame, while her own identity passed from "the author of Frankenstein" to Mrs Shelley. Seymour's extensive reading, in unpublished journals and correspondence, assists her in capturing the grinding minutiae of Mary's melancholic life, a seemingly interminable cycle of birth and death for her children, accompanied by a debilitating guilt that her mother had died shortly after her own birth. Neither the feminist icon nor the sullen wife, Mary emerges as a talented, burdened soul who refused to burn up in her stellar trajectory, but instead found an admirable resilience amid tragedy and decadence. Seymour's occasionally uneven contribution, the first major study of her life (and published redemptively by John Murray, who turned down Frankenstein), quietly dampens the Romantic myth and instead presents a hard-working, troubled artisan more touched than fired by genius. --David Vincent --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A thrilling biography of one of England's most loved authors by a masterful biographer.

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 night emerged in Frankenstein a monster who has haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years. His creator was an eighteen-year-old girl who, in love with the married Shelley, had followed her principles and run away with him. The Mary Shelley we meet here, brilliantly brought to life from previously unexplored sources, is a woman who belongs as much to our own times as to the Romantic Age in which her life began. Her world, so rich in its cast of characters, seems at times drawn from a novel, and at its centre is a writer whose dark and brilliant imagination gave us a myth which seems ever more potent in our own era. 'the most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade' Financial Times

Miranda Seymour is a celebrated biographer and novelist, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Visiting Professor of English Studies at the University of Nottingham Trent. Her biographies include Ottoline Morrell and Robert Graves.