Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality - Hardcover

Sunstein, Emily W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316822469 ISBN 13: 9780316822466

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 1989

Synopsis

"Beyond question Shelley scholars and 19th-century specialists will value this usefully annotated and carefully produced edition; it may also be that anyone would enjoy the stories themselves... and the accompanying original engravings." -- Diane Johnson, Washington Post.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Few literary reputations have been so distorted by admirers and traducers as that of Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (of whom Sunstein wrote a biography) and radical philosopher William Godwin. Shelley wrote not only the first science-fiction novel, Frankenstein , but the first cosmic-calamity novel, The Last Man. In this first complete biography of her, based on exhaustive research, Sunstein puts things to rights by examining Mary Shelley's copious writings in the light of her life: her intellectually stimulating childhood; her tempestuous eight years with Shelley, as lover and then wife; and nearly three decades as author, literary personality, mother and, to a large extent, social outcast. Despite Sunstein's somewhat spikey prose, this is an absorbing study that tells us a great deal not only about the novelist but about the Shelley-Byron circle. Mary Shelley emerges a strong, talented and high-principled woman, no mere rider on her husband's coattails, but an important Romantic in her own right. Illustrations.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review:

"Promises to be the definitive biography of Mary Shelley... Sunstein is to be praised for looking anew at so misunderstood a life."

(New York Times)

"Beyond question Shelley scholars and 19th-century specialists will value this usefully annotated and carefully produced edition; it may also be that anyone would enjoy the stories themselves... and the accompanying original engravings."

(Diane Johnson Washington Post)

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0316822469
• ISBN 13: 9780316822466
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 489