The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

"This book is a valuable contribution which sheds light on the work of both the Shelleys and how two writers can influence, inspire, critique and aid each other in composition."

-- Jacqueline Mulhallen, Author of The Theatre of Shelley (2010), Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary (2015), and the plays Sylvia and Rebels and Friends. Women's Studies Group 1558 – 1837, November 2019

"Going far beyond the complex questions of authorship that arise most famously in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mercer (Cardiff Univ. UK) explores, as she writes in the preface, the "Shelleys’ literary exchange, their collaborative exercises, and their shared working patterns." In keeping with the "Routledge New Textual Studies in Literature" series that this book inaugurates, Mercer focuses her discussions of the Shelleys’ mutual influence on manuscripts and close comparisons of a wide range of texts. She structures the book chronologically. Chapter 1, covering 1814–18, demonstrates the pervasively entangled nature of the Shelleys’ writing up to and including Frankenstein. Chapters 2 and 3 cover the period from 1818 to 1822 and establish the continued collaboration between the Shelleys, despite personal and marital difficulties. Chapters 4 and 5 cover 1822 and after; in them, Mercer redefines collaboration after Percy’s death. She analyzes Mary’s creative activity in producing the first full edition of Percy’s work as "a continuation of a collaborative intertextuality." She then reads Mary’s later fiction and poetry as intertextual responses to Percy’s texts and ideas. This study will be useful to Shelley scholars for its fresh reading of the texts and to those interested in rethinking the concepts of authorship and intertextuality."

--D. D. Schierenbeck, Immanuel Lutheran College. CHOICEconnect April 2020 Vol. 57 No. 8

"Anna Mercer’s first monograph, offers a welcome corrective to the persistent myth that Mary Shelley was an unequal partner in the Shelleys’ literary relationship… The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley provides an opportunity not only to better understand the Shelleys and their works but also to deepen our understanding of the "affective range" of Romantic sociability. The meticulous research presented in this monograph provides ample resources for readers to draw on in future reconsiderations of the Shelleys’—and particularly Mary’s— place in Romantic conversations. I anticipate it will be a frequently cited resource."

--Leila Walker, Queens College, City University of New York. The Wordsworth Circle Volume 51, Number 4.