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Mary Shelley
There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From that night emerged in Frankenstein a monster who has haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years. His creator was an eighteen-year-old girl who, in love with the married Shelley, had followed her principles and run away with him. The Mary Shelley we meet here, brilliantly brought to life from previously unexplored sources, is a woman who belongs as much to our own times as to the Romantic Age in which her life began. Her world, so rich in its cast of characters seems at times drawn from a novel, and at its centre is a writer whose dark and brilliant imagination gave us a myth which seems ever more potent in our own era.
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First published January 1, 2000
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March 7, 2021
I find the fact that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was only 17 years old truly extraordinary. Never again in her writing career would she be able to reach such intellectual and philosophical depth in her work.
The truth is, she would not even come close to the greatness of her first novel. The Last Man is the only thing that displayed even a hint of that initial spark, and even that is largely convoluted and derivative of her own life and the people she knew. It lacked imagination and energy and was instead fuelled by the tragedies she experienced. Death and loss are what she became fixated by as she had lost so many important people. Other than that, she churned out pedestrian short stories and well researched (though very dry) historical novels.
She lived an exceedingly tragic and interesting life, which Miranda Seymore captures here in this fantastically detailed literary biography. She lost her life partner when she was only twenty-four years of age and her mother shortly after she was born. Her great friend Lord Byron died young. After a while, she began to feel like she was the last of her literary generation. She had to write to make a living and at this point (where she is writing only for money) she is at her lowest in terms of literary quality. Her passion clearly waned after the death of husband. Words were about survival, not changing the world and exciting the imaginations of her readers.
For me, Mary Shelley and her immediate circle are some of the most fascinating and extraordinary people of the early nineteenth century. Between them, they produced so many famous and excellent literary works.
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The truth is, she would not even come close to the greatness of her first novel. The Last Man is the only thing that displayed even a hint of that initial spark, and even that is largely convoluted and derivative of her own life and the people she knew. It lacked imagination and energy and was instead fuelled by the tragedies she experienced. Death and loss are what she became fixated by as she had lost so many important people. Other than that, she churned out pedestrian short stories and well researched (though very dry) historical novels.
She lived an exceedingly tragic and interesting life, which Miranda Seymore captures here in this fantastically detailed literary biography. She lost her life partner when she was only twenty-four years of age and her mother shortly after she was born. Her great friend Lord Byron died young. After a while, she began to feel like she was the last of her literary generation. She had to write to make a living and at this point (where she is writing only for money) she is at her lowest in terms of literary quality. Her passion clearly waned after the death of husband. Words were about survival, not changing the world and exciting the imaginations of her readers.
For me, Mary Shelley and her immediate circle are some of the most fascinating and extraordinary people of the early nineteenth century. Between them, they produced so many famous and excellent literary works.
___________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree.
__________________________________
July 17, 2010
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. Although neither believed in marriage, when Wollstonecraft found herself pregnant they decided to marry to make their child's life easier. And thus, a few months after her parents' marriage, Mary Godwin was born. Wollstonecraft died a few agonized days later, probably of peurperal fever.
Four years later, Godwin married Mary Jane Devereux/Vial/Clairmont (she went by a number of different names; she was actually an unwed mother masquerading as a widow), who had children of her own. And thus does Jane Clairmont, later called Claire Clairmont, enter the story. All the little girls and boys grew up in a household full of books and very short on money.
One day, the handsome Percy Shelley entered their lives. 20, a poet, given to extravagant exaggerations about his own actions and the persecution he suffered, Shelley seemed like a savior to Godwin (who expected to get a great deal of money from his aristocratic patron) and Godwin's daughters (who viewed their new friend rather more romantically). Shortly thereafter, Shelley fell in love with 16 year old Mary Godwin (many say for her parentage as well as for her beauty and wit) and, with Jane/Claire Clairmont's help, the girls ran off with him. Of course, Shelley was married at the time, to another teenage girl, and she was pregnant with his second child. But no matter!
Shelley, Mary and Jane/Claire swept across Europe, constantly impoverished but flush with excitement and the romance of it all. A tense triangle sprang up amongst them--Mary and Shelley were in love, but Jane/Claire felt left out, and Shelley liked that she was so sensitive and easily persuaded. Eventually, they ran out of money and returned to England, where they found themselves utterly ostracized. Not even Mary's family would see her, despite their own pasts. Mary's first child was born and died, shortly followed by the birth of another child. She, Shelley and Claire retreated from London for their health, and fell in for a short time with the notorious Lord Byron. Claire had a brief, lopsided affair with him that left her pregnant and Byron annoyed. Meanwhile, Mary had begun to write her greatest work, Frankenstein. This was also a period of tragedy: no sooner had they returned to England than Mary's half-sister Fanny committed suicide in a little anonymous room, and shortly thereafter Shelley's wife Harriet drowned herself. Less than two weeks later, Mary and Shelley were married.
They continued to live much as they had, although Mary's social ostracization was somewhat lessened. Mary bore two more children in short succession, and then lost her son William and daughter Clara while in Italy. She continued writing, studying, translating while simultaneously leading a vivacious social life and producing good copies of her friends' writing. Shelley became distracted by another woman (the duplicitous Jane Williams, oh how I hate her)
And then tragedy struck. Shelley and his friend were drowned at sea, leaving Mary a widow with an infant son and no money, in a foreign land. She returned to England, fought to get a small allowance from her father-in-law, and spent the rest of her life writing articles and books to supplement her income. Her remaining son, Percy, grew up to be a good-natured man with no poetry and little intellect. Mary died of a brain tumor at 53, having spent her life devoted to Shelley and then, to Shelley's legacy.
All of these tempestuous romances, tragic deaths, domestic quarrelings, petty gossiping, and timeless literature went on in a period of incredible tension and upheaval. Revolution after revolution swept Europe. England was a land of strict censorship laws, incredible disparities between rich and poor, strict codes of conduct--and amidst all this, Mary Shelley is just a smart, depressed woman with few allies, trying to live her life. She was intimidatingly well-read, and set herself to a rigorous education of languages and history. Like her mother, she suffered from bouts of depression; and like her mother, she devoted a great deal of time to uplifting women (but in specific cases, not as a general group). She spent her last days campaigning to get a widowed friend of hers a small allowance to live on.
Seymour does an incredible job of creating a seamless biography out of the countless letters, diaries, articles, and books written by and about her subjects. I never felt overwhelmed, although this book is stuffed full of names, quotes, historical contexts, literary criticism...For anyone interested in the Romantics, the history of early nineteenth century, the evolution of political thought, or Mary Shelley herself, I highly recommend this book.
Four years later, Godwin married Mary Jane Devereux/Vial/Clairmont (she went by a number of different names; she was actually an unwed mother masquerading as a widow), who had children of her own. And thus does Jane Clairmont, later called Claire Clairmont, enter the story. All the little girls and boys grew up in a household full of books and very short on money.
One day, the handsome Percy Shelley entered their lives. 20, a poet, given to extravagant exaggerations about his own actions and the persecution he suffered, Shelley seemed like a savior to Godwin (who expected to get a great deal of money from his aristocratic patron) and Godwin's daughters (who viewed their new friend rather more romantically). Shortly thereafter, Shelley fell in love with 16 year old Mary Godwin (many say for her parentage as well as for her beauty and wit) and, with Jane/Claire Clairmont's help, the girls ran off with him. Of course, Shelley was married at the time, to another teenage girl, and she was pregnant with his second child. But no matter!
Shelley, Mary and Jane/Claire swept across Europe, constantly impoverished but flush with excitement and the romance of it all. A tense triangle sprang up amongst them--Mary and Shelley were in love, but Jane/Claire felt left out, and Shelley liked that she was so sensitive and easily persuaded. Eventually, they ran out of money and returned to England, where they found themselves utterly ostracized. Not even Mary's family would see her, despite their own pasts. Mary's first child was born and died, shortly followed by the birth of another child. She, Shelley and Claire retreated from London for their health, and fell in for a short time with the notorious Lord Byron. Claire had a brief, lopsided affair with him that left her pregnant and Byron annoyed. Meanwhile, Mary had begun to write her greatest work, Frankenstein. This was also a period of tragedy: no sooner had they returned to England than Mary's half-sister Fanny committed suicide in a little anonymous room, and shortly thereafter Shelley's wife Harriet drowned herself. Less than two weeks later, Mary and Shelley were married.
They continued to live much as they had, although Mary's social ostracization was somewhat lessened. Mary bore two more children in short succession, and then lost her son William and daughter Clara while in Italy. She continued writing, studying, translating while simultaneously leading a vivacious social life and producing good copies of her friends' writing. Shelley became distracted by another woman (the duplicitous Jane Williams, oh how I hate her)
And then tragedy struck. Shelley and his friend were drowned at sea, leaving Mary a widow with an infant son and no money, in a foreign land. She returned to England, fought to get a small allowance from her father-in-law, and spent the rest of her life writing articles and books to supplement her income. Her remaining son, Percy, grew up to be a good-natured man with no poetry and little intellect. Mary died of a brain tumor at 53, having spent her life devoted to Shelley and then, to Shelley's legacy.
All of these tempestuous romances, tragic deaths, domestic quarrelings, petty gossiping, and timeless literature went on in a period of incredible tension and upheaval. Revolution after revolution swept Europe. England was a land of strict censorship laws, incredible disparities between rich and poor, strict codes of conduct--and amidst all this, Mary Shelley is just a smart, depressed woman with few allies, trying to live her life. She was intimidatingly well-read, and set herself to a rigorous education of languages and history. Like her mother, she suffered from bouts of depression; and like her mother, she devoted a great deal of time to uplifting women (but in specific cases, not as a general group). She spent her last days campaigning to get a widowed friend of hers a small allowance to live on.
Seymour does an incredible job of creating a seamless biography out of the countless letters, diaries, articles, and books written by and about her subjects. I never felt overwhelmed, although this book is stuffed full of names, quotes, historical contexts, literary criticism...For anyone interested in the Romantics, the history of early nineteenth century, the evolution of political thought, or Mary Shelley herself, I highly recommend this book.
March 9, 2014
I've read biographies about the "Shelley/Byron circle" before, but those usually stop somewhere after the deaths of Shelley, Byron and Keats. This is the first time I've read a full biography focusing on Mary Shelley.
She emerges here as a very tragic, flawed character: intelligent, misunderstood, gullible, compassionate and forgiving to a fault, loyal, gifted without being self-centered, and independently-minded among other qualities. There did seem to be a clear bias in favor of Mary against her sister, Claire. Both inherited their mother's chronic depression: Claire inherited the propensity for paranoia and anxiety while Mary inherited the deep melancholy. Yet the author presents Claire as melodramatic in the extreme and border-line insane, while treating Mary with great compassion and understanding.
Mary nearly emerges as a saint in this work: a flawed saint with very human weaknesses, but still a saint. Yet it's difficult not to sympathize deeply, and take sides with Mary (and the author) against all who misunderstand, betray, or otherwise abuse her kindness, goodness, and compassion as well as her gifts and her status as poet's widow and guardian of his reputation.
This is a detailed, extensive, yet imminently readable introduction to the life of Mary Shelley, author of "Frankenstein" and "The Last Man." Those who love her works and those interested in post-Revolution and Victorian England will find a great deal here worth considering and appreciating.
She emerges here as a very tragic, flawed character: intelligent, misunderstood, gullible, compassionate and forgiving to a fault, loyal, gifted without being self-centered, and independently-minded among other qualities. There did seem to be a clear bias in favor of Mary against her sister, Claire. Both inherited their mother's chronic depression: Claire inherited the propensity for paranoia and anxiety while Mary inherited the deep melancholy. Yet the author presents Claire as melodramatic in the extreme and border-line insane, while treating Mary with great compassion and understanding.
Mary nearly emerges as a saint in this work: a flawed saint with very human weaknesses, but still a saint. Yet it's difficult not to sympathize deeply, and take sides with Mary (and the author) against all who misunderstand, betray, or otherwise abuse her kindness, goodness, and compassion as well as her gifts and her status as poet's widow and guardian of his reputation.
This is a detailed, extensive, yet imminently readable introduction to the life of Mary Shelley, author of "Frankenstein" and "The Last Man." Those who love her works and those interested in post-Revolution and Victorian England will find a great deal here worth considering and appreciating.
June 26, 2019
Certainly the most definitive biography of Mary Shelley available, Seymour covers all of the bases with literary flair. I walk away thinking we perhaps will never truly know Mary Shelley, and the tragedy of her life is not that her husband died so early, but that Mary had to live through 30 years of savagery of her morality and reputation.
From the moment of her birth, literally, Mary was oppressed. She was never allowed to forget that her sainted and lauded mother died from puerperal infection after giving birth to her. She had a remote and sometimes stern father of surpassing literary genius in William Godwin. She spent a good deal of time away from home after her father remarried, unhappily for Mary. Her stepsister, "Clare", would be one of the banes of her life. She would always carry the shadow of her husband and their social reputation with her to her final days. And yet, she produced one of the most controversial novels of all time in Frankenstein and one could argue that her reputation surpasses her poet husband's in today's age.
By the time of her death, everyone had turned against her. All of the existing correspondence indicates she had a terrible reputation both professionally, socially, and even within her own family, other than her son and daughter-in-law. Seymour covers all of this in detail, and yet, I was still left with the question why? Why would Mary cling so closely to her son in her adulthood? Why would she be considered so cold and distant by all of her closest acquaintances?
She clung because she was always abandoned. Left with the guilt of her mother's death, she was never consoled on that fact and often felt like the stepsister rather than the true daughter after Godwin remarried so quickly. She was shipped out to relatives and made to fend for herself. No wonder she was seduced by Shelley. Once she made the fateful decision to run off with a married man (who surely adored her in those early days), her fate was sealed. She would never escape the calumny of "eloping" with a married man nor of his radical political views. She lost multiple children, enhancing her deficient sense of the dangers of childbirth, so when she lost Percy Shelley himself, she clung to the only thing that reminded her of a stable household, her only surviving child that bore her husband's name. It was all she had left.
Seymour also does a great job of quickly but thoroughly delineating all of the biographical evidence that was destroyed throughout the years, as well as how those clues were inferred or re-discovered. Yet, I am left with the impression that Mary has more in common with the creature in Frankenstein than I previously knew: desperate to be acknowledged as a valuable human being, outcast, judged and blamed for catastrophes, and still hard to fathom after all these years. That I thirst for more is a credit to Seymour.
From the moment of her birth, literally, Mary was oppressed. She was never allowed to forget that her sainted and lauded mother died from puerperal infection after giving birth to her. She had a remote and sometimes stern father of surpassing literary genius in William Godwin. She spent a good deal of time away from home after her father remarried, unhappily for Mary. Her stepsister, "Clare", would be one of the banes of her life. She would always carry the shadow of her husband and their social reputation with her to her final days. And yet, she produced one of the most controversial novels of all time in Frankenstein and one could argue that her reputation surpasses her poet husband's in today's age.
By the time of her death, everyone had turned against her. All of the existing correspondence indicates she had a terrible reputation both professionally, socially, and even within her own family, other than her son and daughter-in-law. Seymour covers all of this in detail, and yet, I was still left with the question why? Why would Mary cling so closely to her son in her adulthood? Why would she be considered so cold and distant by all of her closest acquaintances?
She clung because she was always abandoned. Left with the guilt of her mother's death, she was never consoled on that fact and often felt like the stepsister rather than the true daughter after Godwin remarried so quickly. She was shipped out to relatives and made to fend for herself. No wonder she was seduced by Shelley. Once she made the fateful decision to run off with a married man (who surely adored her in those early days), her fate was sealed. She would never escape the calumny of "eloping" with a married man nor of his radical political views. She lost multiple children, enhancing her deficient sense of the dangers of childbirth, so when she lost Percy Shelley himself, she clung to the only thing that reminded her of a stable household, her only surviving child that bore her husband's name. It was all she had left.
Seymour also does a great job of quickly but thoroughly delineating all of the biographical evidence that was destroyed throughout the years, as well as how those clues were inferred or re-discovered. Yet, I am left with the impression that Mary has more in common with the creature in Frankenstein than I previously knew: desperate to be acknowledged as a valuable human being, outcast, judged and blamed for catastrophes, and still hard to fathom after all these years. That I thirst for more is a credit to Seymour.
Read
July 12, 2010I'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 propriety in their earthly dealings. Far from it! Many of these souls were metoric, Promethean, dangerous to those who would love them, and idealistic even to the point of self-destruction. Many were ostracized or vilified. Nevertheless, these alchemized souls left a supernal residue in the forms of books, paintings, music, children, and sometimes--rarely--new ways of seeing the world, or conceptions of individual liberty. Seymour pays equal heed to them all, and writes perceantly and empathetically of the great divide between the augustan ideals to which many of these creators and thinkers aspired, and the mortal travails which inevitably lay a drag to their initially untrammeled and heady race towards history.
September 4, 2020
REREADING 2020
Reading for Notes Fall/Winter 2020
The Definite Biography of Mary Shelley. More to say later. (first read)
(Second read)
Mary Shelley is a very interesting person and I have a lot of admiration for her, both as a human being and writer. That said, I definitely fall into the Percy Shelley camp, if there is one. I feel that Mary Shelley was very much like her father in personality, and that she suffered from the depression that both her mother and half sister, Fanny, had. Scholars can decide how she fits in the canon. I own everything she has written. My favorite novel of hers is The Last Man.
Reading for Notes Fall/Winter 2020
The Definite Biography of Mary Shelley. More to say later. (first read)
(Second read)
Mary Shelley is a very interesting person and I have a lot of admiration for her, both as a human being and writer. That said, I definitely fall into the Percy Shelley camp, if there is one. I feel that Mary Shelley was very much like her father in personality, and that she suffered from the depression that both her mother and half sister, Fanny, had. Scholars can decide how she fits in the canon. I own everything she has written. My favorite novel of hers is The Last Man.
May 26, 2021
A heavy tome. It's a shame Miranda Seymour didn't like her subject more. She made it tedious and unpleasant to be in the company of her subject and her companions. While the research is impressive, it is lacking in narrative verve. Seymour knows how to line up her facts and dates in a row although sometimes the similarity of names and the proliferation of dates swirl around like alphabet noodles in a boiling stew, but she does not know how to write an engaging story and bring her subjects to life (no punny sense intended). I soldiered through to the end and learned some interesting things about Mary Shelley herself and her life after Shelley's death by drowning.
April 27, 2012
This book about Mary Shelley and her milieu is fascinating and horrifying at once. Horrifying, not because of her tale of Frankenstein's monster but because of the status of women. The women who tried to change the mores of the day, including Mary's mother Mary Wollstonecraft, seemed to suffer even more than the general female populace. But like one drawn to a fire, the reader can hardly pull away from this account of the times.
June 2, 2010
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.
January 6, 2018
The last paragraph eloquently sums up Seymour's clear-eyed but also passionately sympathetic assessment of Mary Shelley. The book shows that Seymour spend a lot of quality research time on her subject and ended up respecting her all the more for it. I was sorry to leave such good company.
September 24, 2013
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 biography, it's hard to effectively rate it, so feel free to discount my rating.
I felt Seymour included a lot of information in this biography of Mary Shelley. In fact, I learned a lot about her mother, her father, her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Of course these individuals were huge influences in her life so I felt it was appropriate. The only thing I didn't particularly like about the book was that sometimes it was just confusing. This had a little to do with the jumping in referring to future and past dates particularly when discussing correspondence and a lot to do with sentence composition and wording choices.
Overall, I think it was interesting and provided a lot of information. However, it was also fairly obvious that Seymour wasn't as impartial a historian as she could have been, definitely favoring Mary Shelley and attempting to convince her readers how Mary was often misunderstood and misrepresented in so many previous biographies or historical text.
I felt Seymour included a lot of information in this biography of Mary Shelley. In fact, I learned a lot about her mother, her father, her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Of course these individuals were huge influences in her life so I felt it was appropriate. The only thing I didn't particularly like about the book was that sometimes it was just confusing. This had a little to do with the jumping in referring to future and past dates particularly when discussing correspondence and a lot to do with sentence composition and wording choices.
Overall, I think it was interesting and provided a lot of information. However, it was also fairly obvious that Seymour wasn't as impartial a historian as she could have been, definitely favoring Mary Shelley and attempting to convince her readers how Mary was often misunderstood and misrepresented in so many previous biographies or historical text.
January 4, 2017
Mary Shelley's life was full of passion and tragedy and she could have learnt more from her mother Mary Wollstonecraft and asserted herself against the appalling way Percy Bysshe Shelley treated his wife. In her diary of 4 August 1819 Mary Shelley wrote,
"We have lived five years together and if all the events of the five years were blotted out I might be happy."
December 13, 2008
Seymour writes well and engaging. The biography presents Mary in a fair; in other words, she is not presented as a saint.
December 18, 2008
A definitive biography of Mary Shelley.
October 14, 2009
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.
June 22, 2013
Dreadful fictionalized biography of pre-Frankenstein Mary Shelley. Skip.
April 18, 2016
I. Like. This. Book
March 14, 2018
The drama. The consequences. The letters. CLAIRE.
I enjoyed every moment I spent reading this book (it was a lot of moments) and found so much to love about this book.
I was one of those people who have read Frankenstein and admired it. I also admired the fact that it was written by a woman, Mary Shelley. I knew she was married to a poet, and that’s about all I knew.
Two things triggered me to pick up this book: 1) Learning she was the daughter of William Godwin, whose economic/moral philosophies were mentioned a few times in a book I had just read, “Strangers Drowning,” about extreme do-gooders, which triggered the Big-Moral-Questions part of my brain. And 2) Reading a positive review of a new YA biography of Mary Shelley, which triggered the There-Is-Some-DRAMA-Up-In-Here part of my brain.
What a ride.
I’m desperately hoping someone makes a mini-series of the relationship between Mary and her step-sister/frenemy, Claire. I can’t get enough Claire, who, aged 14, ran away from home with 15-year-old Mary and the romantic creeper/poet, Percy Shelley (who himself left behind a pregnant wife). The drama only gets wilder from there.
Mary was a talented thinker and writer, and had been raised in an environment of academia and political philosophy by her father. Her values were also equally impressed upon by her mother, one of the “mothers of feminism,” Mary Wollstonecraft, who died from birth complications after delivering her second daughter. The pressure to be a political/philosophical genius, like her parents, was very real to her, and in many ways she embraced it. And in many ways, she did not.
This well-researched book goes through it all.
I’ll leave the synopsis to others and instead touch on some of the issues this book made me think about.
1) Letters and social media. This book actually made me feel a lot better about using social media. The more things change, the more they stay the same, you know? The author meticulously went through letters -- letters that have been copied, edited, shared, hidden, rewritten, and in some cases burned into oblivion and leaving telling holes in their wake. The parallels to people posting, deleting, and unfollowing, etc. were too obvious to disregard. I’ve always been interested in memoir, and how people present their own narratives. This book provides a lot of fodder to think on in that regard.
2) Slavery and racism. I read Frankenstein a long time ago (early 20s, I think), but without any critical essays to help me along. I missed the references to the author’s detestation of slavery. This book made me want to reread Frankenstein just for that.
3) A later edition. The edition on my shelves is the edition that Mary rewrote years after the book was first published, with significant changes. I’d love to compare the two.
4) A crash course in the patriarchy. Her husband treated her (and pretty much everyone else) like crap due to his self-indulgent disregard for responsibility. But hey, he was literally a poet of the romantic age, right? His death made me laugh because it was such a stupid way to go. I didn’t come out of this book with much admiration for Percy Shelley, but I was touched by her endless devotion to him. But, what were her options? She had to bear the consequences for so many of his actions. She didn’t have the privileges afforded him by his sex and credit/wealth, unless she clung to them. And she did. Mary Shelley was a survivor.
5) Female relationships. I can’t get enough of her fascinating relationship with Claire. But that was just the beginning. Mary had so many fascinating friendships in this book that each could be a book on their own. I’m not saying I liked Claire, any more than I liked Mary, to be honest. But I felt I understood them both. And Mary’s daughter-in-law, with her dogged determination to carry on and promote Mary and Percy’s reputations was terribly interesting as well.
All in all, it’s a long book (561 pages, not counting the appendices and index), but I’d highly recommend it.
I enjoyed every moment I spent reading this book (it was a lot of moments) and found so much to love about this book.
I was one of those people who have read Frankenstein and admired it. I also admired the fact that it was written by a woman, Mary Shelley. I knew she was married to a poet, and that’s about all I knew.
Two things triggered me to pick up this book: 1) Learning she was the daughter of William Godwin, whose economic/moral philosophies were mentioned a few times in a book I had just read, “Strangers Drowning,” about extreme do-gooders, which triggered the Big-Moral-Questions part of my brain. And 2) Reading a positive review of a new YA biography of Mary Shelley, which triggered the There-Is-Some-DRAMA-Up-In-Here part of my brain.
What a ride.
I’m desperately hoping someone makes a mini-series of the relationship between Mary and her step-sister/frenemy, Claire. I can’t get enough Claire, who, aged 14, ran away from home with 15-year-old Mary and the romantic creeper/poet, Percy Shelley (who himself left behind a pregnant wife). The drama only gets wilder from there.
Mary was a talented thinker and writer, and had been raised in an environment of academia and political philosophy by her father. Her values were also equally impressed upon by her mother, one of the “mothers of feminism,” Mary Wollstonecraft, who died from birth complications after delivering her second daughter. The pressure to be a political/philosophical genius, like her parents, was very real to her, and in many ways she embraced it. And in many ways, she did not.
This well-researched book goes through it all.
I’ll leave the synopsis to others and instead touch on some of the issues this book made me think about.
1) Letters and social media. This book actually made me feel a lot better about using social media. The more things change, the more they stay the same, you know? The author meticulously went through letters -- letters that have been copied, edited, shared, hidden, rewritten, and in some cases burned into oblivion and leaving telling holes in their wake. The parallels to people posting, deleting, and unfollowing, etc. were too obvious to disregard. I’ve always been interested in memoir, and how people present their own narratives. This book provides a lot of fodder to think on in that regard.
2) Slavery and racism. I read Frankenstein a long time ago (early 20s, I think), but without any critical essays to help me along. I missed the references to the author’s detestation of slavery. This book made me want to reread Frankenstein just for that.
3) A later edition. The edition on my shelves is the edition that Mary rewrote years after the book was first published, with significant changes. I’d love to compare the two.
4) A crash course in the patriarchy. Her husband treated her (and pretty much everyone else) like crap due to his self-indulgent disregard for responsibility. But hey, he was literally a poet of the romantic age, right? His death made me laugh because it was such a stupid way to go. I didn’t come out of this book with much admiration for Percy Shelley, but I was touched by her endless devotion to him. But, what were her options? She had to bear the consequences for so many of his actions. She didn’t have the privileges afforded him by his sex and credit/wealth, unless she clung to them. And she did. Mary Shelley was a survivor.
5) Female relationships. I can’t get enough of her fascinating relationship with Claire. But that was just the beginning. Mary had so many fascinating friendships in this book that each could be a book on their own. I’m not saying I liked Claire, any more than I liked Mary, to be honest. But I felt I understood them both. And Mary’s daughter-in-law, with her dogged determination to carry on and promote Mary and Percy’s reputations was terribly interesting as well.
All in all, it’s a long book (561 pages, not counting the appendices and index), but I’d highly recommend it.
October 27, 2019
I'm not a great reader of biographies, and though I admire Frankstein and accept it has had an enormous cultural influence, I don't like it or care much to reread it. But this book was 99p on Amazon, her life story sounded intriguing, and the reviews were glowing, so...Very glad I gave it a chance. Clearly there's a good story to tell, but Seymour is a thorough and scrupulous researcher as well as an excellent writer. I could hardly put this down. It also brought me back to (Percy Bysshe) Shelley's work, so bonus.
July 4, 2024
This was such a good biography of Mary Shelley. Miranda Seymour did such a good job of really bringing this time period to life (the description of England in the first chapter was so well written in capturing the vibrancy of all the new information and technology that was changing the world). She also managed to give lots of details without bogging the reader down (something I don't think the biographer of the Vivienne Eliot book I read was successful at). Mary Shelley lived such a fascinating, but sad, life.
September 4, 2020
This excellent biography from Ms Seymour shows there was more to Mary Shelly than being the creator of Frankinstein and being Percy Shelly's wife. Her life was not an easy one especially as she chose to live by her mother's vision of how a woman could live. Having to share Shelly with her step-sister cannot have been easy either, but this was a woman who chose her own path and refused to deviate from it. Wonderful read.
March 11, 2021
One of the best-researched books on Mary Shelley's life that I have come across thus far. The writing is beautiful and imaginative in the missing moments of Shelley's life where Seymour had to fit certain missing pieces together to form a flowing narrative that never lost momentum. If you desire to get down to minutiae Mary's life, or investigate all the fascinating seedlings of Frankstein's creation, this memoir has it all.
December 14, 2021
Omg I can’t believe I actually finished this the year I started it! No matter what else I read the rest of this year I’m just happy this is done! This was definitely tough to get through at times, but so informative and I learned a lot more than I was expecting to!
January 13, 2022
I am not the greatest lover of Frankenstein, but I have been enthralled by the story of its author for quite some time now. This biography does justice to Mary Shelley and brings her to life admirably and in a very engaging manner. In fact, this is one of the best biographies I have ever read.
March 29, 2025
Could be about 15o pages shorter. Seymour gets bogged down in the details and with introducing people who ended up not being particularly significant to Shelley's life. The big life events don't get the treatment they deserve.
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January 14, 2020Extremely informative,and a joy to read.
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February 28, 2020(Book source: public library loan)
April 11, 2020
Very well written. Pace kept up throughout. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
May 21, 2021
It’s very refreshing to read a biography about Mary Shelley that isn’t also about everyone else she knew.
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November 21, 2021Such a well-researched biography.
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