In the 150 years since her death, Mary Shelley has suffered at the hands of throngs of literary critics and historians. Now, in Miranda Seymour, she finds a biographer both meticulous and sympathetic. Seymour has written notably as a literary historian before, on the social circle of Henry James. “Mary Shelley” (Grove, 655 pages, $35) stands as her first major biography — one that should be welcomed as the major biography of a major author whose reputation has rested too heavily on those of her husband, father, mother and monster.
Shelley’s birth in 1797 was followed immediately by the death of her celebrated mother, the radical writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Raised by her equally renowned father, William Godwin, Shelley inherited her mother’s ambition and independence of mind but also the inner melancholy that went with them.
Shelley was only 16 when reckless, high-born Percy Shelley “burst into [the Godwins’] lives like a comet” and “presided over the devastation of all their hopes.” Percy was brought into the family fold by the financially struggling Godwin, who saw in the young aristocrat-revolutionary a potential paying patron. Instead, the impulsive, young (married) poet spirited away two of his daughters, to the enduring damage of the family’s reputation.
More than half of Seymour’s book covers the eight tumultuous years between Mary’s flight with Percy and his untimely death. It was during this period, in 1818, that “Frankenstein” was composed and published (Mary would revise it substantially in 1831). Life with Percy — he and Mary were married following his first wife’s death — initially was exhilarating, eventually demoralizing; he conducted numerous affairs and came to cast Mary, in letters and poetry, as a drag on his energies.
Seymour is adept at capturing the cultural climate and social context of the early 19th Century in the English and Italian settings of Shelley’s life story.
If the book is long on personal detail, it includes surprisingly little engagement with the content of Mary Shelley’s writing. Seymour has chosen to write a book that fills the real need for an exhaustive and balanced account of the life that Shelley lived, rather than just one more take on the words she wrote.
