Exploring the Lives of the Revolutionary Romantic Outlaws: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Antonia: In this exceptional, entertaining dual-biography, Charlotte Gordon explores the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley with dedication, warmth, and insight. The author’s device of interweaving the two stories is highly effective, allowing the reader to understand how Wollstonecraft’s legacy influenced her daughter, and to see how they were both deeply affected by the constraints placed on women in their society. More than a biography, this book is a work of social history that will be fascinating to anyone with an interest in the lives of ordinary women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

United Kingdom on Mar 20, 2023

John Hopper: This mammoth book is a brilliantly written double biography of two of the greatest female figures - and figures overall - of late 18th and early 19th century English literature and political philosophy, probably one of the most famous and also misunderstood mother and daughter pairings in history. Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, died in childbirth at the age of 38 giving birth to the future Mary Shelley, best known as the author of Frankenstein. They both struggled against the attitudes of their times, when women were considered their husbands' personal property, yet were also both married to brilliant and (in many ways, though not all) liberal-minded men, William Godwin, political philosopher and novelist; and Percy Shelley, famous poet and outrageous radical of the Romantic period. A lot of aspects of their lives mirror each other in being out of step with the morals of their own, and indeed of much later, times, loving and being loved by their men and giving birth outside wedlock; and having their own outspoken views about society and literature in an era when it was generally assumed that women could not hold properly considered views...

United Kingdom on Apr 17, 2016

Dr. R. Brandon: It was with some trepidation that I bought this mighty tome, this double biography with alternating chapters on Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Godwin, better known as Mary Shelley, I wondered would it work? Well, the answer is a resounding, yes. At first the alternating chapters seem odd, even irritating, and interrupt the flow, but as the book progresses the prevailing influence of Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin upon the successive generation becomes more obvious and the structure of the book increasingly relevant.
Many prospective readers will know Wollstonecraft as a pioneering author on equal rights for women in daily life. However, her biography is an enthralling story of a thrusting and pioneering woman who set to work very early in life but who seemed prone to disastrous relationships with men, resulting in two suicide attempts. This drove her to ever greater efforts to support herself with her writing; an almost unique ambition for the late 18th century. Perhaps her greatest stroke of luck was to befriend the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, famous for publishing the work of Thomas Paine, William Cowper and Erasmus Darwin, and who stood by...

United Kingdom on Jul 14, 2015

eledavf Vivian: The present biographer's purpose is to demonstrate how closely Mary Shelley studied her dead mother's writings and how strongly they influenced her own attitude toward the conventions of her day. Once those points were firmly established, the analysis lost my interest, but fortunately there is much, much more to this book.

This is a dual biography in which the chapters alternate, first for the mother Mary Wollstonecraft, then for her daughter Mary Shelley. The arrangement works surprisingly well.

Both women lived unconventionally, published unconventional books, and were punished by society for transgressions against its rules.

Mary Shelley's own life is full of interesting vignettes. How can anyone not be moved when she and Percy see in the distance a Rhineland castle named Frankenstein, whereupon a peasant tells them that long ago an alchemist lived there who experimented with dead bodies to create living ones. Within a year or two, Mary, at the age of nineteen, wrote the book for which she will always be remembered.

For several years the Shelleys were closely associated with Lord Byron, a man whose friendship never came without an emotional cost to...

United States on Jul 07, 2015

Rachel: This book is nothing short of stunning. An utter tour de force of clarity, engagement and compassion. Justice indeed for these two indivisible trailblazers.

What's more Romantic Outlaws is written in a gloriously eloquent yet accessible style, rendering it able to satisfy a wide range of audiences from the scholarly to the newcomer. Quite simply not just the best biography on Mary Shelley or Mary Wollstonecraft that I've read but the best biography full stop.

I'm a longstanding devotee of both Mary's lives and works. Shelley in particular. There's not a biography on Mary Shelley I've not read, nor a work of hers I don't own. I've her journals, her letters and even a facsimile edition of the original scrawled on manuscript of her most famous work, Frankenstein which is a prized possession. You could say I'm a huge fan. I therefore came to this biography intrigued but with only moderate expectations. Biographies of such luminaries tend to walk one of two paths: worthy, stodgy and leaden or overly flowery, overly dramatised froth. Yet Charlotte Gordon has created a unique work here that somehow reaches into the lives of both women, presents in stunning detail the...

United Kingdom on May 27, 2015

Jaylia: This dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley utterly enthralled me. Both were talented, groundbreaking, independent thinking women, they each had drama and difficulties in their lives worthy of a Brontë novel, and between them they knew intimately some of the most interesting people involved with Romantic literature and radical political thought from the French Revolution through to the mid-Victorian years.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born into a poor family with a very difficult, sometimes violent father, but Wollstonecraft was at least as spirited as he was and she struggled to surmount the boundaries gender and poverty put on her life in every way she could, eventually becoming a leading progressive thinker and the author of several influential books, including A Vindication of the Rights of Women. She loved passionately but refused the traditional roles women were expected to embrace at the time, so she married the political philosopher William Godwin late in life and only reluctantly. Wollstonecraft died days after giving birth to the daughter named for her, so it was through her extensive writings that Mary Godwin Shelley came to...

United States on Apr 28, 2015

sagababe: This is an excellent research tool for discovering the 'behind the scenes' lives of these two pivotal women, both of whom contributed to the changing view and experience of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite never knowing each other ( Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever shortly after Shelley's birth) the influence of her radical life and her views on female equality undergirded her daughter's thinking and can be seen strongly in her fiction.
Gordon uses the unusual structural technique of alternating her chapters on the two women. I found it a little confusing at first, as there are so many similar names, but once I got into the dual narrative, it actually worked well and was a reminder that the two women were so closely linked, familiarly and cognitively. The style of the book is immensely readable, the prose lucid and clear, and the authorial voice does not impose to such an extent that the reader loses sight of the subjects.
There is a strong narrative drive that makes the book easily accessible to someone who does not usually read historical non-fiction. Given that Mary Wollstonecraft's life, work and philosophy is no longer academically...

United Kingdom on Apr 24, 2015