false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180654086m/1062202.jpg 1062202 4 She was the daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and radical philosopher William Godwin, both reviled for their unconventional views. She ran away with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was 16 and wrote <I>Frankenstein</I> when she was 19. Three of her four children died in infancy; her husband drowned before she turned 25. Yet Mary Shelley (1797-1851) persevered to write other novels (none so famous as her first), to nurture her husband's literary status (decidedly shaky at the time of his death), and to support her son and acquire a devoted daughter-in-law who was partly responsible for her rather dull posthumous reputation as the quintessential devoted widow. British novelist and biographer Miranda Seymour paints a more nuanced portrait of Mary as a sharply intelligent, sometimes cantankerous woman who did not always graciously suffer Percy's blithe impetuousness and principled infidelities (possibly including one with her stepsister). Guilt at being the innocent cause of her mother's death may have played a part in the genesis of <I>Frankenstein</I>, Seymour acknowledges, but so did Mary's views on slavery, the landscape of Scotland, and the tales she heard there as a teenager of disastrous Arctic expeditions. The story of how <I>Frankenstein</I> came to be written while the Shelleys were vacationing in Switzerland with Byron is well known, but Seymour retells it well. Her strong account of how Mary's character was formed in conflict, first with an unloved stepmother and then with a difficult husband, makes the subsequent 30 years of her life more understandable and almost as interesting as the first quarter century. Drawing on feminist scholarship of the last 30 years but written for the general public, Seymour's lucid biography captures the whole woman, not just the author of <I>Frankenstein</I> or the grieving widow of Percy Shelley. <I>--Wendy Smith</I> 1048806 2000 Mary Shelley total:19|5:3|4:10|3:4|2:2|1:0| 19 71 40 5 0 1 false false Sat Jan 17 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sat Jan 17 16:11:05 -0800 2009 Sat Jan 17 16:28:19 -0800 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Mon Apr 14 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Apr 26 15:08:45 -0700 2009 Sun Apr 26 15:11:45 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Sat Dec 13 13:18:04 -0800 2008 Sat Dec 13 13:19:18 -0800 2008 5 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2004 Thu Dec 18 09:59:00 -0800 2008 Thu Dec 18 09:59:24 -0800 2008 2 0 false false Mon Sep 28 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Sep 16 10:12:40 -0700 2009 Wed Oct 14 10:07:02 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Wed Nov 11 10:55:38 -0800 2009 Wed Nov 11 10:55:38 -0800 2009 4 0 false false Fri Oct 16 23:24:15 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 16 23:24:15 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Fri Oct 09 12:51:53 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 09 12:51:53 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Sat Sep 19 21:25:39 -0700 2009 Sat Sep 19 21:25:45 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Tue Sep 01 07:46:24 -0700 2009 Tue Sep 01 07:46:24 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Mon Aug 24 08:19:32 -0700 2009 Mon Aug 24 08:19:32 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Wed Aug 12 22:03:38 -0700 2009 Wed Aug 12 22:03:38 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Wed Aug 05 12:23:04 -0700 2009 Wed Aug 05 12:23:04 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Tue Jul 07 21:29:47 -0700 2009 Tue Jul 07 21:29:47 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Sun Jun 28 12:46:31 -0700 2009 Sun Jun 28 12:46:38 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Sun Jun 21 18:39:03 -0700 2009 Sun Jun 21 18:39:13 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Wed Jun 03 16:27:08 -0700 2009 Wed Jun 03 16:27:08 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Sat May 30 11:46:49 -0700 2009 Sat May 30 11:46:49 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Wed May 13 20:42:04 -0700 2009 Wed May 13 20:42:04 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Wed Apr 22 20:48:18 -0700 2009 Wed Apr 22 20:49:02 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=1062202