Romantic Outlaws
Romantic Outlaws

Author: Charlotte Gordon

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2016-02-02

Total Pages: 674

ISBN-13: 0812980476

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NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SEATTLE TIMES This groundbreaking dual biography brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book—until now. In Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon reunites the trailblazing author who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Romantic visionary who gave the world Frankenstein—two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy. In 1797, less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft died, and a remarkable life spent pushing against the boundaries of society’s expectations for women came to an end. But another was just beginning. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary was to follow a similarly audacious path. Both women had passionate relationships with several men, bore children out of wedlock, and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history. The private lives of both Marys were nothing less than the stuff of great Romantic drama, providing fabulous material for Charlotte Gordon, an accomplished historian and a gifted storyteller. Taking readers on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England, she seamlessly interweaves the lives of her two protagonists in alternating chapters, creating a book that reads like a richly textured historical novel. Gordon also paints unforgettable portraits of the men in their lives, including the mercurial genius Percy Shelley, the unbridled libertine Lord Byron, and the brilliant radical William Godwin. “Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every rule there was to break,” Gordon writes of Wollstonecraft and Shelley. A truly revelatory biography, Romantic Outlaws reveals the defiant, creative lives of this daring mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid conventions of their era. Praise for Romantic Outlaws “[An] impassioned dual biography . . . Gordon, alternating between the two chapter by chapter, binds their lives into a fascinating whole. She shows, in vivid detail, how mother influenced daughter, and how the daughter’s struggles mirrored the mother’s.”—The Boston Globe

The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Volume 1)
The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Volume 1)

Author: Mary Shelley

Publisher:

Published: 2016-11-16

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9781540437778

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The first volume of Shelley's letters introduces us to her personality and thoughts, and offers an intimate look into the English literary world as it stood at the beginning of the 19th century. It is through her voluminous letters and correspondences that we gain an intimate insight into Shelley's mental processes, opinions and outlook on life. Attempts were made by Shelley's son to censor and tone down her stark attitudes, so that she may be better accepted into the Victorian culture which fostered and grew her reputation. These letters are however produced without abridgment, allowing the reader a glimpse into the thoughts of one of the era's finest literary women. Revered as the author of the timeless horror novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley would privately express frustrations at this single book eclipsing her other efforts in both fiction and non-fiction. She also possessed political views which she made pains to express via her written works, and was dismayed that most leading critics of the day either ignored or simply missed these references in her fiction. Although the odds were stacked against Mary Shelley from her earliest years simply because of her gender - a fact which she was all too aware - her letters demonstrate a determination and strength of spirit. Her correspondences with Percy in particular evidence a soul capable of passions great and bold, while several of her views on emancipation and individual liberty were startlingly ahead of their time. Biographical annotations by Florence Ashton Marshall are situated between many of the letters within this book. These explain what events transpired between the individual letters, letting the reader better follow what Shelley alludes and refers to. Thus, this collection of Shelley's letters is immensely readable, absorbing and insightful.

Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13:

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The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley reveal a remarkable woman living in a remarkable age. They date from October 1814 - shortly after her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley - through September 1850, five months before her death. Her correspondents' names are familiar - Shelley himself, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, General Lafayette, Sir Walter Scott - and the letters abound with anecdotes about such eminent figures as her parents (William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft), Keats, Washington Irving, and Charles and Mary Lamb. Publication of the widely acclaimed three-volume edition of Mary Shelley's letters was completed in 1988, containing all 1,276 of her known extant letters. Now Betty T. Bennett has selected 230 of those letters to give an overview of Mary Shelley's life as she was seeing it, living it, and recording it. Bennett also includes an introductory essay that sketches a portrait of Mary Shelley, her world, and her place in the history of literature and letters.

In Search of Mary Shelley
In Search of Mary Shelley

Author: Fiona Sampson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1681778211

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We know the facts of Mary Shelley’s life in some detail—the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person—what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did—despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life.In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.

Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley

Author: Catherine Reef

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2018-09-18

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1328526879

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This YA biography offers “a thorough, sensitive portrayal of one of literature’s most remarkable authors, illustrated with period portraits and engravings” (Kirkus). Most famous for her iconic tale of gothic horror, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley led a life that could itself have been a gothic novel. This “fascinating, scandal-rich” biography recounts a story full of drama, death, and one of the strangest romances in literary history (Booklist). Raised by her father, the political philosopher William Godwin, Shelley ran away to Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was only sixteen years old. It was there, during a cold and wet summer, that she first imagined her story about a mad scientist who brought a corpse back to life. Success soon followed for Mary, but also great tragedy and misfortune. In Mary Shelley, Catherine Reef brings this passionate woman, brilliant writer, and forgotten feminist into crisp focus, detailing a life that was remarkable both before and after the publication of her immortal masterpiece.