Synopses & Reviews
A daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who authored the daring
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the radical philosopher William Godwin, Mary Shelley grew up amid the literary and political avant-garde of early-nineteenth-century London. Her escape to France at seventeen with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley caused great scandal at home. The couple’s stormy relationship unraveled as they journeyed across Europe. They ultimately settled in Switzerland where, in 1816, they rented a villa near Lord Byron’s on Lake Geneva. In a famous night of eerie thunderstorms, they told ghost stories and tales of horror, giving birth to the idea of Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years. The Mary we meet here, brilliantly brought to life by Seymour from previously unexplored sources, is flawed, brave, generous, and ultimately struck by tragedy: she came to lose three of her four children in infancy, and when she was twenty-four Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy.
Gracefully moving through the dramatic life of the woman behind history’s most legendary monster, Miranda Seymour unbuttons a world of brilliant literary figures and vividly re-creates the imaginative time in which Frankenstein was born.
Review
"A thoughtfully considered, lifelike portrait of a complex, often misunderstood character . . . sensitive and intelligent." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Davy invented the electric light and began to isolate the elements. Although he joined a long line of people who had no idea what electricity was, he laid them in the aisles at the Royal. He was a spellbinding lecturer, handsome in an androgynous way, and girls like our Mary [Shelley] wrote him poetry. Trolling for good scientific ghost-story material, she was reading a book of his essays before she had her dream and wrote her book. She gave Victor Frankenstein Humphrey Davy's laboratory. And because electricity could be anything and made corpses wink — and because she apparently never read Galvani's retraction — she let Frankenstein pump electricity into his stitched-together monster." L. J. Davis, Harper's Magazine (Read the entire )
Synopsis
Gracefully moving through the dramatic life of the woman behind history’s most legendary monster, Miranda Seymour unbuttons a world of brilliant literary figures and vividly re-creates the imaginative time in which Frankenstein was born.
About the Author
Miranda Seymour, author of Mary Shelley, celebrated as both a novelist and a biographer, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor of English Studies at the University of Nottingham Trent.