Mary Shelley

Well-known scholars review Mary Shelley's work in several contexts (literary history, aesthetic and literary culture, the legacies of her parents) and also analyze her most famous work-- Frankenstein. The contributors also examine Shelley as a biographer, cultural critic, and travel writer. The text is supplemented by a chronology, guide to further reading and select filmography.

Although Frankenstein is now widely taught in classes on Romanticism, little attention has been paid to the considerable corpus of Mary Shelley's other works. Indeed the excitement of the last decade at feminist approaches to Frankenstein has ironically obscured the persona of its author. This collection of essays, written by a preeminent group of Romantic scholars, sketches a portrait of the "other Mary Shelley": the writer and intellectual who recognized the turbulent interplay among issues of family, gender, and society, and whose writings resonate strongly in the setting of contemporary politics, culture, and feminism. By analyzing a previously neglected body of novels, novellas, reviews, travel writing, essays, letters, biographies, and tales, and by emphasizing Mary Shelley's shrewd assessment of Romanticism, the essays in this volume offer a ground-breaking evaluation of one of the foremost cultural critics of the nineteenth century.

A futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague, The Last Man is Mary Shelley's most important novel after Frankenstein. With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters.

Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and affected their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s and discusses the work of such well-known figures as Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. This examination of women writers' fatal women in historical, political and medical contexts exposes a far-ranging debate on sexual difference.

Valperga (1823), the novel Mary Shelley wrote after Frankenstein, is based on the life of Castruccio Castracani (1281-1328), Prince of Lucca. A brilliant soldier and cruel tyrant, he successfully commanded Ghibelline forces in Tuscany against the Guelphs. Woven into the story of this factional conflict are the tragic destinies of two heroines, fictional creations of the author. Ethanasia, Countess of Valperga, finds herself increasingly torn between loyalty to her Guelph roots and her lifelong affection for Castruccio. Beatrice, whom the author's father, William Godwin, described as 'the jewel of the book', is a heretical Paterin with whom Castruccio falls in love only to abandon. This meticulously researched historical novel combines a narrative of suspense with a remarkable reconstruction of manners in the Middle Ages. Set in the period of Dante's lifetime, it is also suffused with a poetic spirit which evokes the beauties of Italy's physical environment and points to the melancholy inevitability of change. This edition provides a clear account of the circumstances in which Valperga was composed and published.

In Paris during the summer of 1814, two lovers, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, began a chronicle of their life together, starting with an account of the day they eloped to France. These journals--kept during the early years by both of them and then, after their marriage, mostly by Mary alone--are an essential source of information about the lives, both individually and together, of two major British literary figures. This critical edition, the first to be faithful to the manuscript, presents the full text of all surviving journal entries and provides extensive biographical commentary drawn from unpublished as well as published sources.