Mary Shelley, Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters

by Anne K. Mellor

Book Overview

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0416017614
• ISBN13: 9780416017618
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Methuen Publishing
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

In depth look at Shelley's Life and Work

From Preface: "Because of her historical circumstances, Mary Shelley was throughout her childhood deprived of a loving nuclear family. She desperately sought to create such a family, both in her life and in her fiction. In 'Frankenstein' she analyzed the disastrous consequences of the absence of a nurturing parent or supportive family. In her subsequent novels she idealized the benevolent and democratically structured bourgeois family. But even as she did so, she registered her contradictory consciousness that the egalitarian family she craved might not be possible, at least not in the world of 19th century middle-class England to which she belonged. I argue that the fundamental tension in Mary Shelley's writing is not so much the 'ambivalence with regard to female self-assertion' - or conflict between the desire to be an original romantic writer and the social requirement to be a modest, decorous lady - which Mary Poovey described so powerfully in her path-breaking 'The Proper Lady and the Women Writer (1984). Rather, it is the more profound contradiction inherent in the very concept of an egalitarian bourgeois family promoted in Mary Shelly's fiction. For the bourgeois family is founded on the legitimate possession and exploitation of property and on an ideology of domination- whether of the male gender over the female or of parents over children - that render it innately hierarchical. Since Mary Shelley's critique of romantic and patriarchal ideologies in sweeping in its implications, I have found myself drawing on insights and interpretive methods garnered from a wide range of sources: Self-in-Relation psychology (Chodorow, Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller), feminist critical theory, cultural anthropology, Marxism, and the new historicism. I have tried to weld these disparate but often mutually enriching approaches and disciplines into a coherent reading of Mary Shelley's life and work. ... I being with an account of Mary Shelley's childhood and romance with Percy Shelley, then turn to an examination of her first novel, 'Frankenstein,' paying careful attention in my third chapter to the changes that Percy Shelley made to his wife's manuscript. After considering several ideological issues at stake in this, Mary Shelley's greatest novel, I turn to her later works, identifying the ways in which 'Mathilda' and 'The Last Man' wrestle with both her personal and political obsessions. My final chapter is devoted to those works - 'Mathilda', 'Valperga,' 'Lodore,' and 'Falkner' - which most strikingly manifest the contradictions inherent in Mary Shelley's idealization of the bourgeois family."

Wonderful Piece of Literary Criticism

This book captures every aspect of Mary Shelley's life that evolved into her fictive imagination. The readers are introduced to much less popular works such as The Last Man, Lodore and Mathilda which actually give a unique perspective to Frankenstein. For myself there were some places I felt I was given too many examples, I had already figured out Mellor's point several paragraphs before, but the book makes every possible attempt to explain the novels so that everyone understands.

Excellent resource on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein

This book is an excellent text for the study of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. It will fascinate those interested in the life of Mary Shelley, students studying Frankenstein, and those interested in learning about an 19th Century woman writer, who wrote a novel about a monster that has since become a universal archetype of isolation and societal rejection. In this text, it is demonstrated how events in Mary Shelley's life, her fears of motherhood, and her study of current philosophic and scientific theories all contributed to the development of the novel. Mary Shelley is proven to be an intelligent and complex woman writer of the Romantic Literary tradition