Mary Shelley

This new book offers a feminist reappraisal of Mary Shelley (1797-1851) that includes but also goes beyond Frankenstein (1818) to consider a selection of her novels, short fiction, poetry, and life writing from a career that spanned nearly three decades. By comparing Shelley’s early and late publications, putting her in dialogue with her bestselling female contemporaries, and drawing on archival material to contextualise her contributions to the periodical press, this study reveals previously unseen continuities in her work and affinities with other women writers. It acknowledges Shelley’s illustrious parentage, marriage, and social circle without making these biographical contexts the master keys to interpreting her work. Instead, the book pays close attention to the strategies Shelley developed to navigate political, personal, and financial constraints whilst posing challenges to the ideologies and practices that oppress women and undermine social progress. These strategies include her use of covertly transgressive female characters, her innovations in narrative structure, her attention to women’s relationships, her complex and varied deployment of auto/biographical material, and her unrelenting emphasis on sympathy and sociality.  Finally, the book turns to Mary Shelley’s ’afterlives’, exploring her status and significance as a popular writer both in her time and in ours. The book argues for Shelley as a lifelong critic of the patriarchy whose full literary and political importance is best appreciated through a multimodal study of her work.