Mary Shelley's Early Novels

Mary Shelley's Early Novels PDF Author: Jane Blumberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This long-overdue reappraisal of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's work convincingly challenges the commonly held view that she was merely a passive mouthpiece for her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, for her father, William Godwin, and for the radical milieu that surrounded her. Jane Blumberg reexamines Shelley's most challenging and ambitious novels - the best-known, Frankenstein; the historical novel Valperga; and The Last Man, a futuristic novel detailing the destruction of the world's population by plague - in light of her premise that the actual driving force in Shelley's writings was her fundamental intellectual conflict with the men in her life. Blumberg departs from traditional scholarship which has focused on the personal influences in Shelley's fiction - her father's emotional coldness, difficult childbirth and postpartum depressions, the difficulties of being a woman writer, for example - to show how these novels reflect both Shelley's assertion of her intellectual and ideological independence and her gradual rejection of Percy Shelley's radical tenets. Blumberg also gives due attention to Shelley's competent work as editor and in-house critic of Byron and Percy Shelley and provides a revisionist account of her role as her husband's literary executor, giving her credit for her meticulous care in developing printed texts from the poems she edited directly from manuscripts.

Mary's Monster

Mary's Monster PDF Author: Lita Judge
Publisher:
ISBN: 1626725004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A free verse biography of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, featuring over 300 pages of black-and-white watercolor illustrations.

In Search of Mary Shelley

In Search of Mary Shelley PDF Author: Fiona Sampson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681778211
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book 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.

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley PDF Author: Miranda Seymour
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571279678
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
Mary Shelley's own life was as dramatic as her fiction. Even had she not (at the age of 19) authored Frankenstein, one of the greatest horror fables in literature, she would be crucial to the study of Romanticism, as the daughter of two of the great radical thinkers of the day, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (who died following Mary's birth); and as the second Mrs Percy Bysshe Shelley, her companion for that stormy stay at Byron's Geneva villa in 1816 - the 'haunted summer' that begat Frankenstein. Drawing on unexplored sources, Miranda Seymour's hugely acclaimed biography penetrates the myth to offer the fullest, richest portrait of this extraordinary woman. 'Mary Shelley is the most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for an entire decade.' Financial Times 'Brilliant and enthralling, this portrait illuminates Mary's life in many unexpected ways.' Independent on Sunday 'Miranda Seymour has vivid narrative gifts and a perceptive understanding of the main personalities.' New York Times Book Review 'A thoughtfully considered and exceptionally lifelike portrait of a complex and often misunderstood character.' Los Angeles Times 'A harrowing life, wonderfully retold.' Washington Post Book World 'A splendid biography.' New Yorker

Frankenstein

Frankenstein PDF Author: Shelley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789356845138
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Frankenstein is a novel by Mary Shelley. It was first published in 1818. Ever since its publication, the story of Frankenstein has remained brightly in the imagination of the readers and literary circles across the countries. In the novel, an English explorer in the Arctic, who assists Victor Frankenstein on the final leg of his chase, tells the story. As a talented young medical student, Frankenstein strikes upon the secret of endowing life to the dead. He becomes obsessed with the idea that he might make a man. The Outcome is a miserable and an outcast who seeks murderous revenge for his condition. Frankenstein pursues him when the creature flees. It is at this juncture t that Frankenstein meets the explorer and recounts his story, dying soon after. Although it has been adapted into films numerous times, they failed to effectively convey the stark horror and philosophical vision of the novel. Shelley's novel is a combination of Gothic horror story and science fiction.

History of a Six Weeks' Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland

History of a Six Weeks' Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland PDF Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 67

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Book Description
History of a Six Weeks' Tour is a travel narrative by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It takes us on a journey through France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland, while adding an element of romantic philosophy into the mix.

The Last Man Annotated

The Last Man Annotated PDF Author: Mary W Shelley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
The Last Man is an apocalyptic science fiction novel. The book tells of a future world (the first-person narrative is that of a man living at the end of the 21st century) that has been ravaged by a plague. The novel was harshly reviewed at the time, and was virtually unknown until a scholarly revival beginning in the 1960s.

Romantic Outlaws

Romantic Outlaws PDF Author: Charlotte Gordon
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812980476
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 674

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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SEATTLE TIMES This groundbreaking dual biography brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book—until now. In Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon reunites the trailblazing author who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Romantic visionary who gave the world Frankenstein—two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy. In 1797, less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft died, and a remarkable life spent pushing against the boundaries of society’s expectations for women came to an end. But another was just beginning. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary was to follow a similarly audacious path. Both women had passionate relationships with several men, bore children out of wedlock, and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history. The private lives of both Marys were nothing less than the stuff of great Romantic drama, providing fabulous material for Charlotte Gordon, an accomplished historian and a gifted storyteller. Taking readers on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England, she seamlessly interweaves the lives of her two protagonists in alternating chapters, creating a book that reads like a richly textured historical novel. Gordon also paints unforgettable portraits of the men in their lives, including the mercurial genius Percy Shelley, the unbridled libertine Lord Byron, and the brilliant radical William Godwin. “Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every rule there was to break,” Gordon writes of Wollstonecraft and Shelley. A truly revelatory biography, Romantic Outlaws reveals the defiant, creative lives of this daring mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid conventions of their era. Praise for Romantic Outlaws “[An] impassioned dual biography . . . Gordon, alternating between the two chapter by chapter, binds their lives into a fascinating whole. She shows, in vivid detail, how mother influenced daughter, and how the daughter’s struggles mirrored the mother’s.”—The Boston Globe

Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley PDF Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley reveal a remarkable woman living in a remarkable age. They date from October 1814 - shortly after her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley - through September 1850, five months before her death. Her correspondents' names are familiar - Shelley himself, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, General Lafayette, Sir Walter Scott - and the letters abound with anecdotes about such eminent figures as her parents (William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft), Keats, Washington Irving, and Charles and Mary Lamb. Publication of the widely acclaimed three-volume edition of Mary Shelley's letters was completed in 1988, containing all 1,276 of her known extant letters. Now Betty T. Bennett has selected 230 of those letters to give an overview of Mary Shelley's life as she was seeing it, living it, and recording it. Bennett also includes an introductory essay that sketches a portrait of Mary Shelley, her world, and her place in the history of literature and letters.

Lodore

Lodore PDF Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description


Mary Shelley Horror Stories

Mary Shelley Horror Stories PDF Author: Mary Shelley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 178755256X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Curated new collections. Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein is the foundation of modern SF, fantasy and horror fiction, was born to the writer William Godwin and social campaigner Mary Wollstonecraft. This new, special collection brings together extracts of her novels and short stories, with an emphasis on the supernatural.