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Mary Shelley
"Mary Shelley is the definitive account of the gifted and tragic author whose escape to France at seventeen with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley caused great scandal in London and permanently scarred her reputation. The couple traveled, with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont in tow, from France to Italy and Switzerland. In the summer of 1816 they rented a villa...more
Paperback, 672 pages
Published
September 10th 2002
by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
(first published 2000)
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I'm reading this slowly and really savoring it. The biographer is a masterful writer and researcher, and this work also contains in-depth portraits of Shelley's extremely influential parents (William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft) and many of the literary luminaries (Coledrige, Lamb, etc.) who were intimates and influences in their circle. Many of these intellectuals were born or bred firebrands, and I find this books is disabusing me of the notion that these thinkers aspired to or achieved pro...more
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Mary Wollstonecraft was a passionately political woman; her essays A Vindication of the Rights of Man and its follow up, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, made her justly famous, particularly in intellectual circles. After a disastrous love affair (from which issued A Short Residence in Sweden Norway and Denmark and her natural daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft fell in love with William Godwin. Godwin was well known himself, particularly for Enquiry concerning Political Justice. Alth...more
I'm not exactly sure how to go about rating biographies. I'm not particularly a fan of non-fiction and I definitely think it's a genre that is a little harder to rate than fiction. This is due to many factors, the primary one being that there is no way I can verify or dispute the veracity of the text. The primary reason I read biographies is to find out more about authors or people in which I'm interested. Since, for me, this is the determining factor on which to judge the quality of a biogr...more
Very interesting life told in a very entertaining way. I've read lots of complaints that this book is dry and that the chronology is weird, but I didn't have that problem with it. The only complaint I can really see people having with it is that the author makes a lot of assumptions about the activities engaged in by the author for purpose of narration which I can see hurting credibility a little bit but are precisely what makes it NOT dry.
I liked that the author gave us a good look...more
I liked that the author gave us a good look...more
Not very well written and difficult to follow at times. I managed to get through it but it took me awhile and I don't know that it was worth the effort. I found Mary to be likable as person and I don't think the book managed to explain why so many people that Mary knew didn't like her! Everyone seemed to dislike and turn against her for no seemingly good reason.
Seymour writes well and engaging. The biography presents Mary in a fair; in other words, she is not presented as a saint.
A definitive biography of Mary Shelley.
After reading Byron in Love I became more interested in the Shelleys, particularly Mary. I enjoyed what I read but this was so all encompassing and moved rather slowly, so eventually I gave up.
The writing is on the dry side, but the research is good and Seymour is clear about speculative vs. supported statements. I ended up quite convinced by her interpretation of MWS as a depressive who constantly struggled against feelings of guilt for the death of her mother, Shelley's first wife, and Shelley himself.
Kathy
marked it as to-read
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