Mrs. Shelley

Mary Shelley lived one of the most extraordinary lives in English literature. At nineteen, she invented a monster that would never die, authoring Frankenstein in 1816 during a legendary summer storm with Lord Byron. But her own story proves even more haunting than her fiction: daughter of the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin, she married the poet Percy Shelley and survived him, along with the deaths of three of her four children. Lucy Madox Rossetti, writing from within the Victorian literary establishment, brings unique authority to this portrait. Daughter of painter Ford Madox Brown and wife of Pre-Raphaelite William Michael Rossetti, she moved through the same artistic circles that had shaped Mary's world. This is not merely a life of the woman who gave us Frankenstein, but a reckoning with what it meant to be a female writer in an age of great male poets, to carry the weight of brilliant parents, and to outlive everyone you loved.