Mary Shelley Book

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 Seymour's extensive reading, in unpublished journals and correspondence, assists her in capturing the grinding minutiae of Mary's melancholic life, a seemingly interminable cycle of birth and death for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 VincentRead More