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Winner of the Prize for Independent Scholars from the Modern Language AssociationNotable Book of the Year from The New York Times Daughter of pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and radical philosopher William Godwin, lover and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of Frankenstein and creator of the science fiction genre, Mary Shelley has remained a figure both undervalued and enigmatic. In this authoritative, ground-breaking biography, she is finally restored to her rightful stature as one of the major figures in English literary history. Here for the first time is a full account of Mary Shelley's career, significant areas of which have never before been examined: her precocious childhood, her adolescent liaison with the radical poet Shelley, her creation of Frankenstein at the age of nineteen, her tempestuous but brilliant married years with Shelley, and, of particular note, the dramatic second half of her life, after Shelley's death. Emily Sunstein has also discovered previously unknown works written by Mary Shelley and traces the development of her unjustly clouded posthumous reputation.

"She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything else she undertakes, almost invincible." Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in 1814, when she was eighteen. By then, she had been living for two years in a scandalous relationship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married with children. The novel was conceived in a contest with him and Lord Byron to tell ghost stories. When she eloped with Shelley, Mary had been quite prepared to suffer condemnation from society. It was much harder to cope with her jealousy of Claire, her step-sister, who had run away with them and was also in love with Shelley. During the nine turbulent years Mary and Shelley were together, Claire was the ever-present third, whose manipulative behaviour often drove Mary to despair. Shelley was little help - his unconventional attitudes to love strained her devotion to its limits. They moved constantly throughout England, Switzerland and Italy, escaping creditors, censorious families and ill health. It was in Italy that they found their spiritual home, their 'paradise of exiles', but it was also there that the loss of her children nearly broke Mary's spirit. Her writing became her grip on sanity, and Shelley never wavered from his belief in her creative genius - as she believed in his.

These eight volumes contain the works of Mary Shelley and include introductions and prefatory notes to each volume. Included in this edition are "Frankenstein" (1818), "Matilda" ((1819), "Valperga" (1823), "The Last Man" (1826), "Perkin Warbeck" (1830) and "Lodore" (1835).

Essays on British writers of fantasy and science fiction during a time when science, technology and industrialization made increasingly impressive inroads from the Enlightenment to World War I.A gradual emphasis on social improvement, including literature, involved efforts to increase literacy through expanding material to read. During this period, publication of newspapers, penny dreadfuls and dime novels lead to pulp magazines and other popular periodicals.

"Iconoclastic Departures contributes to the ongoing reevaluation of Mary Shelley as a professional author in her own right with a lifelong commitment to the development of her craft. Many of its essays acknowledge the importance of her family to her work - the steady theme of much earlier scholarship - but for them the family has become an imperative socio-psychological context within which to better understand her innovations in the many literary forms she worked with during her career: journals, letters, travelogues, biographies, poems, dramas, tales, and novels." "The book's essays also convey the conviction that even if Mary Shelley, after Percy Shelley's death, gradually retired from public life as his relatives wished, she retained a resiliently resistant attitude toward many of the established orders of her day, easily recovered by a careful look beyond her "feelings" to the productions of her literary "imagination."" "The Mary Shelley who inhabits this three-part collection of portraits is a radical, even if a quiet radical. Part 1 focuses on various moments in her construction of her authorial identity; parts 2 and 3 anatomize the nature of her resistance and her innovation. She is presented as a writer who reappropriates authority for herself, who redesigns genres, who redefines gender, who rewrites history and biography, who revises her readers' aesthetic expectations, and who protests cultural imperialism at home and abroad. It seems significant to the contributors to this volume that this new, radical Mary Shelley was not invented by a pointed call for papers but emerged spontaneously from an open invitation to scholars working in various corners of the English-speaking world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved