The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Volume 1 (of 2)

This landmark Victorian biography retrieves Mary Shelley from the shadow of her famous husband and restores her as a towering literary figure in her own right. Born to Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical feminist who died giving her life, and William Godwin, the philosopher who proved brilliant at ideas but hapless at fatherhood, young Mary was left to navigate grief, instability, and the towering expectations of two legacies. Mrs. Julian Marshall traces the making of a novelist whose childhood was scarred by her mother's suicide attempts, her father's coldness, and the household chaos of his remarriage, yet who somehow emerged to write Frankenstein at eighteen. The biography draws extensively on letters to illuminate the intellectual ferment of Mary's upbringing among England's most controversial thinkers, and to document her fateful meeting with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the married poet who would become both her greatest passion and her deepest wound. Volume One concludes with the legendary summer of 1816, when Mary conceived her immortal story in a villa beside Lake Geneva, teeming with ghosts and ghost stories. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the woman behind the monster, and the crucible of tragedy and intellect that produced one of literature's most enduring creations.