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

Romantic Outlaws

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

Get Book Here

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

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley PDF Author: Betty T. Bennett
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801859762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
"Recognition of Mary Shelley's systemic dual focus on public and domestic power as the means to interrogate traditional norms and propose alternatives materially alters parochial perceptions of her objectives and her achievements. Her novels, outside of Frankenstein, and recently, The Last Man, have been dismissed as simple, mutual dissociated "romances" or experiments in genre solely to intersect with a market niche; they are neither. Rather, they and all of Mary Shelley's major works voice a cosmopolitan, socio-political reformist ideology that evolved as their author's acute awareness of world events enabled her to calibrate her literary voice to deal with unfolding rather than past societal issues. Her multidisciplinary fusion of literature, political philosophy, and history calls for a commensurate multidisciplinary reading in order to understand the complexities of both the author and her works." —Betty T. Bennett In this book, Betty T. Bennett offers an extensively expanded version of the introduction she wrote for Pickering and Chatto's eight volume set, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. Along with her insightful retelling of Mary Shelley's eventful life story, Bennett gives us a fresh reading of Frankenstein in the context of its author's full career. She also discusses a variety of Mary Shelley's lesser known works, including Matilda, Valperga, The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck, Lodore, Falkner, and her travel books. The result is a compelling portrait of Mary Shelley as she saw herself—an inventive, irreverent writer whose desire for political and social reform was at the heart of her literary expression for three decades.

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.

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.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley PDF Author: Helen M. Buss
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 088920943X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Pioneers in life writing, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818 ), are now widely regarded as two of the leading writers of the Romantic period. They are both responsible for opening up new possibilities for women in genres traditionally dominated by men. This volume brings together essays on Wollstonecraft’s and Shelley’s life writing by some of the most prominent scholars in Canada, Australia, and the United States. It also includes a full-length play by award-winning Canadian playwright Rose Scollard. Together, the essays and the play explore the connections between mother and daughter, between writing and life, and between criticism and creation. They offer a new understanding of two important writers, of a literary period, and of emergent modes of life writing. Essayists include Judith Barbour, Betty T. Bennett, Anne K. Mellor, Charles E. Robinson, Eleanor Ty, and Lisa Vargo. Among the works discussed are Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, Letters from Norway, and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman; William Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft; and Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Last Man, Ladore, and Rambles in Germany and Italy.

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.

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.

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

The New Southern Gentleman

The New Southern Gentleman PDF Author: Jim Booth
Publisher: Watchmaker Publishing
ISBN: 9780972178600
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
"Daniel Randolph Deal is a Southern aristocrat, having the required bloodline, but little of the nobility. A man resistant to the folly of ethics, he prefers a selective, self-indulgent morality. He is a confessed hedonist, albeit responsibly so."--Back cover

Tales and Stories

Tales and Stories PDF Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description