But who was the woman who lived it? She's left plenty of evidence, and in this fascinating dialogue with the past, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story.
Most astonishingly, it was while she was still a teenager that Mary composed her canonical novel Frankenstein, creating two of our most enduring archetypes today. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.SHORTLISTED FOR THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2018'If we get another literary biography in 2018 as astute and feelingful as this one, we shall be lucky.' - John Carey, Sunday TimesMary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day.Īged sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe, as she coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life forever. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes.
But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person-what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did-despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life. We know the facts of Mary Shelley's life in some detail-the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed.
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