Review by New York Times Review
THERE HAVE BEEN more than 20 biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, including one in 1951 by Muriel Spark and one in 2001, considered by many to be definitive, by Miranda Seymour, who had access to previously unpublished documents. There is even a Mary Shelley encyclopedia. But Mary's life has unending fascination - her elopement as a pale, beautiful, brilliant 16-year-old with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married with a child; her starring role in Lord Byron's famous challenge to the assembled company that rainy night on Lake Geneva, that each produce a ghost story. Of course, Mary, not either of the male poets, won the challenge. Thus was born "Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus," about the creation of a desperately lonely monster who exacts vengeance on his maker by killing those closest to him, including his bride on their wedding night. Now, in time for the 200 th anniversary of "Frankenstein," comes another biography, "In Search of Mary Shelley," by the British poet Fiona Sampson. In previous biographies, Sampson writes, Mary has often come off as "little more than a bright spot being tracked as she moves from one location to another"; her goal is to "bring Mary closer to us." In attempting this, Sampson writes mostly in the present tense. As previous biographers have, she sees Mary's turbulent life in the context of the Romantic Movement, and as part of an early wave of feminism that ended in the conservative Victorian era and its careful presentation of domestic contentment. In places, her book reads more like social history than biography. At almost every dramatic moment, Sampson digresses, filling in the picture with background information, some of it fascinating, some annoying. The horrifying story of Mary's birth in 1797, when a doctor's dirty fingers fatally infected her mother, the feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, as he extracted the afterbirth, is interrupted by a history of the neighborhood real estate and the renewal of the Alien Act (regulating the influx of emigres in the wake of the French Revolution). Later, Sampson gives us details about the popularity of curtains in the early 19 th century and the advent of "industrial rolled plate glass." Referring to the rainy weather on the night of the ghost story challenge, she notes that "the European climate has been cooling since the mid-14th century." (Once she mistakenly calls Byron's half sister his stepsister.) Yet even Sampson's most elaborate digressions can't dampen the attraction of reading about a life as rich with romance and tragedy. Percy Shelley died in 1822, and Mary spent more years as his widow than as his consort. She was devoted to his memory, but, Sampson writes, often depressed. She doted on her surviving child, the stolid Percy Florence, who was interested in sailing, not poetry. She edited collections of Shelley's poems and wrote six more novels, with middling success, few of which are now read. Subsisting on a tiny allowance from Shelley's father, Sir Timothy, who had disapproved of Mary and threatened to cut her off if she published his son's poetry or biography, Mary wrote genre fiction for London Magazine. Sampson tells us that Mary was disappointed in love. Some accounts say that she was attracted to Washington Irving, apparently a handsome fellow, but nothing came of it, or of other infatuations. She may have had a lesbian relationship, and she committed the decidedly revolutionary act of abetting the elopement of two friends, one of them a cross-dresser who insisted on taking a man's name. Mary died in 1851. Sampson's book does little to alter our conception of her as a passionate radical, stoically enduring Shelley's infidelities and the deaths of three of their four children. "She changed the face of fiction," Sampson observes. "She has challenged every 'modern' generation since she wrote her first novel to explore both empirical science and moral philosophy; and in the hubristic researcher Frankenstein and his creature, the nearly human of our nightmares, she created two enduring archetypes." An argument can be made for that - and, indeed, for the publication of yet another biography of this extraordinary woman. ? DlNlTlA smith is the author, most recently, of "The Honeymoon," a novel about George Eliot's marriage to John Walter Cross.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 5, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Too often relegated to the sidelines by her famous parents, radical philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and husband, Romantic poet extraordinaire Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley nevertheless left an enduring mark on literary history with the publication of Frankenstein in 1818. True to its subtitle, this biography focuses on the influences in her life that culminated in her creation of the creature. Mary's unconventional childhood; the death of her mother; her marriage to the free-thinking, often free-loving Shelley; and the tragic loss of her husband and three of her children are all given their due. The birth of Frankenstein is credited to a challenge initiated by Lord Byron to write ghost stories. Combining gothic, romantic, and horror elements, Mary spun an indelible tale that has spanned centuries, genres, and mediums. Plumbing her formative years as well as the depths of her psyche for clues, Sampson chronicles the circumstances and events that preceded her subject's extraordinarily imaginative leap into new literary horizons. Unfortunately, most of Mary's private letters and journals did not survive; however, this lack of primary source material does not detract from the fascinating story of the inner workings and motivations of a genius well ahead of her time on the 200th anniversary of her masterpiece.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
To mark the bicentennial of Frankenstein's publication, poet Sampson (Limestone Country) has created an incisive and emotionally resonant portrait of Mary Shelley, the brilliant woman who wrote that dark masterpiece. In an often speculative but persuasive portrait of Shelley's inner and outer life, Sampson takes Shelley out of the shadow of her prodigious, radical parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to Mary, and Sampson argues that the search for a mother figure never ended for Shelley, who maintained an antagonistic relationship with her stepmother, and drew close to female friends of her mother later in life. Themes of birth, death, and creativity permeated both Shelley's writing and her life. She experienced loss on an almost unimaginable scale, including the deaths of three of her four children in their youth, and yet persevered in her dream of being a writer. Because so much of Shelley's early correspondence was lost, Sampson often relies on conjecture to get inside her subject's mind and feelings. This approach may not be to everyone's taste, but it creates an almost cinematic picture of long-ago events and succeeds in bringing an unconventional woman to vivid life. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Poet and classically trained violinist -Sampson (The Catch) brings a luminous vision to her new biography of Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Too often, studies of Shelley intended for wide readerships-as this book is-lean too heavily on reader response criticism and focus on Frankenstein's creature as a cultural icon, at the expense of representing Shelley's story. Sampson valuably addresses why Frankenstein possesses such enduring power: the monster "lets us play with the anxieties we have about human nature itself" on the screen. On the page, there is more, for the narrative forces readers to "choose between two truths." The moral ambiguities of the novel and its later incarnations provide a significant subtext to Sampson's well-researched contribution to research on Shelley's life and times. Shelley "forced open the space for herself in which to write," notes Sampson, and left behind a huge blueprint for "writing women, for the always emerging, always creative, scientific imagination and for the dreams and nightmares of the Western world," a truth as necessary for us now as it was during the 19th century. VERDICT Highly recommended for general readers interested in women's writing and literary history.-Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fresh biography of Mary Shelley (1797-1851), who created the monster that has become "part of our shared imagination."Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died just after she was born, leaving her and her older, illegitimate sister, Fanny, to be raised by her father, William Godwin. Since her parents were two of the leading political philosophers of the time, Mary received a fine education in the humanities, developing her reasoning skills. Godwin was also an anarchist and utilitarian who seemed to approve of the Romantic poets and free loveexcept for Percy Shelley. As his protg, Shelley met Mary when she was 16, and he was married with a pregnant wife. They soon ran off to Europe and took Mary's stepsister, Jane, with them. Throughout the marriage, they shared their talents and supported and encouraged each other. But Shelley handled money poorly, and they soon had to return to London to the first of innumerable homes throughout Europe. Jane, who soon changed her name to Claire, met and fell for Lord Byron and persuaded Percy and Mary to meet up with him at Lake Geneva. As Sampson (Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form, 2016, etc.) shows in this perceptive biography, it was there that Frankenstein was born, with Byron's challenge to write ghost stories. Begun when she was 19, Mary's novel, often considered the first work of science fiction, was finished and published before she was 21. With it, she changed the face of fiction, revealing the experimental spirit of the Romantic period. Unfortunately, their marriage was also experimental and filled with inequities. Shelley was a firm believer in free love, particularly for himself. After a series of pregnancies and only one surviving child, Mary still believed in their love, even more so after his death. Throughout, Sampson demonstrates why the story of Shelley and Frankenstein remains so intriguing, even today.The author deftly plumbs the depths of Mary's psyche to enlighten us about both Shelleys and reveal the profound effects they had on each other. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
