The Other Mary Shelley

Although Frankenstein has now been canonized in the Romantic classroom, less attention than ever has been paid to the considerable corpus of Mary Shelley's other works - in fact, until now the excitement of the last decade over feminist themes found in Frankenstein has helped to obscure the actual persona of its author. This collection of essays however, written by a pre-eminent assemblage of Romantic scholars, begins to sketch a portrait of the other Mary Shelley ; the writer and intellectual who recognized the turbulent relationship among the various agendae of family, gender, and society, and whose narratives still resonate strongly in the setting of contemporary politics and culture. By analysing a previously neglected body of reviews, essays, novellas, letters, biographies, sketches, and tales, and in locating Mary Shelley as a shrewd critic of the Romantic zeitgeist, the essays in this volume offer a ground-breaking, complete evaluation of one of the foremost thinkers of the 19th century. Review: this is an important volume, not only allowing Mary Shelley to escape from the monster to be seen whole, but also restoring to Frankenstein a context of literary-historical specificity of ambivalences set up by the intersection of romanticism and feminism. The Byron Journal