The Other Mary Shelley Beyond Frankenstein [Hardcover]

AlthoughFrankensteinis now widely taught in classes on Romanticism, little attention has been paid to the considerable corpus of Mary Shelley's other works. Indeed the excitement of the last decade at feminist approaches toFrankensteinhas ironically obscured the persona of its author. This collection of essays, written by a preeminent group of Romantic scholars, sketches a portrait of the other Mary Shelley : the writer and intellectual who recognized the turbulent interplay among issues of family, gender, and society, and whose writings resonate strongly in the setting of contemporary politics, culture, and feminism. By analyzing a previously neglected body of novels, novellas, reviews, travel writing, essays, letters, biographies, and tales, and by emphasizing Mary Shelley's shrewd assessment of Romanticism, the essays in this volume offer a ground-breaking evaluation of one of the foremost cultural critics of the nineteenth century.

The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankensteinis an important and honest book because it takes its readers to the point of reading Mary Shelley in ways that go beyond the ideological premises on which much of it is based. --Christianity and Literature