Author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of Frankenstein, as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. This collection of essays, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, offers a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley, emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. Mary Shelley in Her Times brings fresh insight to the life and work of an often neglected or misunderstood writer who, the editors remind us, spent nearly three decades at the center of England's literary world during the country's profound transition between the Romantic and Victorian eras. The essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of Mary Shelley's neglected novels, including Matilda, Valperga, The Last Man, and Falkner. Other topics include Mary Shelley's work in various literary genres, her editing of her husband's poetry and prose, her politics, and her trajectory as a female writer. This volume advances Mary Shelley studies to a new level of discourse and raises important issues for English Romanticism and women's studies.

What is best and most compelling about Mary Shelley in Her Times is the freshness of the perspectives articulated in the essays, the breadth of the material considered, the clarity and energy of the writing itself, and the overall impressiveness of the underlying scholarship. The quality of the work assembled here speaks very well indeed for the future of Romantics scholarship. -- Stephen C. Behrendt, University of Nebraska

About the Author
Betty T. Bennett is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Literature at American University. She is the editor of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction, available from Johns Hopkins. Stuart Curran is Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Poetic Form and British Romanticism. A collection of essays about Percy Bysshe Shelley compiled by Bennett and Curran, Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, is also available from Johns Hopkins.

Reviews
This is a book to be commended not only for the range of topics it offers, but for the way in which it represents a wide range of styles and approaches. -- John Williams British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin and Review Mary Shelley in Her Times contains some of the strongest essays of recent times on Shelley's work... A valuable piece of criticism. -- Ashley Chantler Byron Journal Refreshing, alternative readings to the until now predominantly psychobiographical approach... The essays by William St Clair and the late Mitzi Myers are particular highlights in this solid collection. -- Heidi Thomson Yearbook of English Studies 2004



Book Information
ISBN 9780801877339
Author Betty T. Bennett
Format Paperback
Page Count 328
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 490g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 18mm