Synopses & Reviews
In fascinating detail. . . . [Morse] touches on many topics, yet keeps separate Victorians of very different cultural worlds. . . . Mid-Victorian Britain memorably presented.
--Choice
Covering the four decades from the accession to the throne by Queen Victoria in 1837 to her proclamation as Empress of India in 1877, High Victorian Culture is an in-depth study of Victorian literature and culture in its heyday. The age of Dickens, Carlyle, Mill, George Eliot, Tennyson, and Browning, it is a time of growing national self-confidence and of impressive industrial, scientific and literary achievements. It is an age also marked by dislocation and uncertainty, in which certain familiar landmarks of a society crumble and disappear. It is a world haunted, in a way, by its own strategic silences, as a society that is in many ways profoundly undemocratic finds itself driven by democratic rhetoric. It is a culture in which the freedom of speech and openness of discussion it claims to tout so highly can actually masks prospects of revelation deeply disturbing to some its finest cultural practioners.
Extending his capacity for meshing the economic, political, religous, and artistic influences on literature to a new era, David Morse offers a new cultural perspective on the first four decades of the Victorian era.
Synopsis
This is the first and only complete edition of all the published writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of the feminist movement. Wollstonecraft's writings include fiction, journalism, reviews, and diaries, and confirm her place in history as a significant force in the young rationalist movement in education and politics. The set features extensive footnotes, a comprehensive index, a general introduction, and specialist introductions to each selection, and is handsomely bound in pure woven cloth over millboard.
About the Author
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in England on August 30, 1797. Her parents were two celebrated liberal thinkers, William Godwin, a social philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a women's rights advocate. Eleven days after Mary's birth, her mother died of puerperal fever. Four motherless years later, Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, bringing her and her two children into the same household with Mary and her half-sister, Fanny. Mary's idolization of her father, his detached and rational treatment of their bond, and her step-mother's preference for her own children created a tense and awkward home. Mary's education and free-thinking were encouraged, so it should not surprise us today that at the age of sixteen she ran off with the brilliant, nineteen-year old and unhappily married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley became her ideal, but their life together was a difficult one. Traumas plagued them: Shelley's wife and Mary's half-sister both committed suicide; Mary and Shelley wed shortly after he was widowed but social disapproval forced them from England; three of their children died in infancy or childhood; and while Shelley was an aristocrat and a genius, he was also moody and had little money. Mary conceived of her magnum opus, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, when she was only nineteen when Lord Byron suggested they tell ghost stories at a house party. The resulting book took over two years to write and can be seen as the brilliant creation of a powerful but tormented mind. The story of Frankenstein has endured nearly two centuries and countless variations because of its timeless exploration of the tension between our quest for knowledge and our thirst for good. Shelley drowned when Mary was only 24, leaving her with an infant and debts. Mary died in 1851 at the age of 54 from a brain tumor.