Mary Shelley in Her Times

What is best and most compelling about Mary Shelley in Her Times is the freshness of the perspectives articulated in the essays, the breadth of the material considered, the clarity and energy of the writing itself, and the overall impressiveness of the underlying scholarship. The quality of the work assembled here speaks very well indeed for the future of Romantics scholarship. -- Stephen C. Behrendt, University of Nebraska

This volume advances Mary Shelley studies to a new level of discourse and raises important issues for English Romanticism and women's studies.Author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of Frankenstein, as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. This collection of essays, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, offers a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley, emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. Mary Shelley in Her Times brings fresh insight to the life and work of an often neglected or misunderstood writer who, the editors remind us, spent nearly three decades at the center of England's literary world during the country's profound transition between the Romantic and Victorian eras. The essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of Mary Shelley's neglected novels, including Matilda, Valperga, The Last Man, and Falkner. Other topics include Mary Shelley's work in various literary genres, her editing of her husband's poetry and prose, her politics, and her trajectory as a female writer. This volume advances Mary Shelley studies to a new level of discourse and raises important issues for English Romanticism and women's studies.