In search of Mary Shelley
By: Fiona Sampson
Edition: First Pegasus Books hardcover edition.
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781681777528
Copyright date: 2018
Subjects: Women authors; Criticism and interpretation; Biography; English Authors
Other titles: In search of Mary Shelley :
Description: We know the facts of Mary Shelley's life in some detail--the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person--what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did--despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life. In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.

We know the facts of Mary Shelley's life in some detail, but previous books have ignored the real person-- what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did. Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, and answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. -- adapted from jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-294) and index.
Table of contents: title: Part One: The Instruments of Life; title: The Instruments of Life; title: Learning to Look; title: Through a Door Partly Opened; title: Elopement; title: Becoming a Couple; title: At Villa Diodati; title: A Young writer; title: Emigrants; title: Part Two:Borne Away by the Waves; title: Le reve est fini; title: The Mona Lisa Smile; title: Coda.