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Summary
Summary
Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein in 1818, a prize-winning poet delivers a major new biography of Mary Shelley?as she has never been seen before.
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. 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.
In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. 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. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.
Author Notes
Fiona Sampson is a poet who has been shortlisted twice for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. She has received the Cholmondeley Award, the Newdigate Prize, and the Writer's Award from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust. Please visit her at www.fionasampson.co.uk.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
To mark the bicentennial of Frankenstein's publication, poet Sampson (Limestone Country) has created an incisive and emotionally resonant portrait of Mary Shelley, the brilliant woman who wrote that dark masterpiece. In an often speculative but persuasive portrait of Shelley's inner and outer life, Sampson takes Shelley out of the shadow of her prodigious, radical parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to Mary, and Sampson argues that the search for a mother figure never ended for Shelley, who maintained an antagonistic relationship with her stepmother, and drew close to female friends of her mother later in life. Themes of birth, death, and creativity permeated both Shelley's writing and her life. She experienced loss on an almost unimaginable scale, including the deaths of three of her four children in their youth, and yet persevered in her dream of being a writer. Because so much of Shelley's early correspondence was lost, Sampson often relies on conjecture to get inside her subject's mind and feelings. This approach may not be to everyone's taste, but it creates an almost cinematic picture of long-ago events and succeeds in bringing an unconventional woman to vivid life. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Too often relegated to the sidelines by her famous parents, radical philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and husband, Romantic poet extraordinaire Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley nevertheless left an enduring mark on literary history with the publication of Frankenstein in 1818. True to its subtitle, this biography focuses on the influences in her life that culminated in her creation of the creature. Mary's unconventional childhood; the death of her mother; her marriage to the free-thinking, often free-loving Shelley; and the tragic loss of her husband and three of her children are all given their due. The birth of Frankenstein is credited to a challenge initiated by Lord Byron to write ghost stories. Combining gothic, romantic, and horror elements, Mary spun an indelible tale that has spanned centuries, genres, and mediums. Plumbing her formative years as well as the depths of her psyche for clues, Sampson chronicles the circumstances and events that preceded her subject's extraordinarily imaginative leap into new literary horizons. Unfortunately, most of Mary's private letters and journals did not survive; however, this lack of primary source material does not detract from the fascinating story of the inner workings and motivations of a genius well ahead of her time on the 200th anniversary of her masterpiece.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THERE HAVE BEEN more than 20 biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, including one in 1951 by Muriel Spark and one in 2001, considered by many to be definitive, by Miranda Seymour, who had access to previously unpublished documents. There is even a Mary Shelley encyclopedia. But Mary's life has unending fascination - her elopement as a pale, beautiful, brilliant 16-year-old with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married with a child; her starring role in Lord Byron's famous challenge to the assembled company that rainy night on Lake Geneva, that each produce a ghost story. Of course, Mary, not either of the male poets, won the challenge. Thus was born "Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus," about the creation of a desperately lonely monster who exacts vengeance on his maker by killing those closest to him, including his bride on their wedding night. Now, in time for the 200 th anniversary of "Frankenstein," comes another biography, "In Search of Mary Shelley," by the British poet Fiona Sampson. In previous biographies, Sampson writes, Mary has often come off as "little more than a bright spot being tracked as she moves from one location to another"; her goal is to "bring Mary closer to us." In attempting this, Sampson writes mostly in the present tense. As previous biographers have, she sees Mary's turbulent life in the context of the Romantic Movement, and as part of an early wave of feminism that ended in the conservative Victorian era and its careful presentation of domestic contentment. In places, her book reads more like social history than biography. At almost every dramatic moment, Sampson digresses, filling in the picture with background information, some of it fascinating, some annoying. The horrifying story of Mary's birth in 1797, when a doctor's dirty fingers fatally infected her mother, the feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, as he extracted the afterbirth, is interrupted by a history of the neighborhood real estate and the renewal of the Alien Act (regulating the influx of emigres in the wake of the French Revolution). Later, Sampson gives us details about the popularity of curtains in the early 19 th century and the advent of "industrial rolled plate glass." Referring to the rainy weather on the night of the ghost story challenge, she notes that "the European climate has been cooling since the mid-14th century." (Once she mistakenly calls Byron's half sister his stepsister.) Yet even Sampson's most elaborate digressions can't dampen the attraction of reading about a life as rich with romance and tragedy. Percy Shelley died in 1822, and Mary spent more years as his widow than as his consort. She was devoted to his memory, but, Sampson writes, often depressed. She doted on her surviving child, the stolid Percy Florence, who was interested in sailing, not poetry. She edited collections of Shelley's poems and wrote six more novels, with middling success, few of which are now read. Subsisting on a tiny allowance from Shelley's father, Sir Timothy, who had disapproved of Mary and threatened to cut her off if she published his son's poetry or biography, Mary wrote genre fiction for London Magazine. Sampson tells us that Mary was disappointed in love. Some accounts say that she was attracted to Washington Irving, apparently a handsome fellow, but nothing came of it, or of other infatuations. She may have had a lesbian relationship, and she committed the decidedly revolutionary act of abetting the elopement of two friends, one of them a cross-dresser who insisted on taking a man's name. Mary died in 1851. Sampson's book does little to alter our conception of her as a passionate radical, stoically enduring Shelley's infidelities and the deaths of three of their four children. "She changed the face of fiction," Sampson observes. "She has challenged every 'modern' generation since she wrote her first novel to explore both empirical science and moral philosophy; and in the hubristic researcher Frankenstein and his creature, the nearly human of our nightmares, she created two enduring archetypes." An argument can be made for that - and, indeed, for the publication of yet another biography of this extraordinary woman. ? DlNlTlA smith is the author, most recently, of "The Honeymoon," a novel about George Eliot's marriage to John Walter Cross.
Guardian Review
Two hundred years after the creation of the gothic masterpiece, a new study tracks down the woman behind the monster When Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) was a high-spirited teenager, on the onset of puberty, one of her arms became mysteriously handicapped. Perhaps suffering from severe eczema or psoriasis, the arm grew like a monstrous appendage stitched from some other body on to her own. It was a formative bodily episode that led to the young woman being sent away from her family home in the stinking streets around Londons Smithfield market to recuperate in the sea air of Ramsgate. In the longer term, it may have contributed imaginative material for the corporeal form of the creature she invents in her first novel [who] will be stitched together by Frankenstein. In In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein, published to mark the novels bicentenary, Fiona Sampson sets out to retrieve Mary Shelley precocious child, celebrated writer, anguished mother and wife from the shadow of the celebrity friends and family by whom she is often obscured: from her parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin ; her husband, the charismatic atheist and free love advocate, Percy Bysshe Shelley ; her friend and literary confidant, Lord Byron; even Marys own creation, Frankensteins monster, one of literatures most enduring archetypes. Mary has gone missing from literary history, Sampson claims; she has fade[d] to white like Frankensteins creature who goes out, alone again, onto the Arctic ice to die. Sampson attributes Marys supposed erasure to a combination of celebrity eclipse, compounded by some hidden hands destruction of her correspondence, the loss of her juvenilia in a trunk mislaid in Paris during her 1814 elopement, disappearance of volumes of her journal; and Marys own reticence, resulting in the lack of published autobiographical material. In the face of this archival dearth, Sampson nevertheless builds a personality, piecing together what it must have been like to grow up and live as Mary Shelley, until we can see the actual texture of her existence. In places, Sampson is as adept as Frankenstein himself, giving life to a figure who convincingly aches and bleeds. She points out the importance of the sex of Frankenstein s author, noting that the period in which Mary writes the book, from the autumn of 1816 to December 1817, is full of intensely corporeal changes: births (of Marys third child, Clara, and of her stepsister Claire Clairmonts daughter Alba, later renamed Allegra); and deaths (the suicides of Marys sister Fanny and Percys first wife Harriet). Frankenstein becomes a lens through which we peer into Marys embodied self, and vice versa. We are invited to imagine inhabiting the infected arm, the postpartum body, the compound tiredness that must come from breastfeeding while living on an inadequately understood vegetarian diet, the miscarriages that ensured Mary cannot avoid knowing that the creation of life is costly and difficult, and to give life to a full-term, fully human progeny more difficult still. The landscapes and interiors within which Sampsons subject moves are as crisply rendered as Frankensteins own plane of Arctic ice: the swiftly urbanising fields north of Londons Pancras Place, where Mary is born; the Alpine glacier that her journal recorded as the most desolate place in the world; the palatial rooms of a handsome palazzo in Pisa in which the Shelleys lived in splendid isolation. Towards the end of her life, aged 51, we read of Mary attempting not to vegetate, in her words, at her dead husbands birthplace, Field Place in Sussex, accompanied by her surviving son, Percy Florence, and her daughter-in-law. Sampson warns that the apparent symmetry of her later years, between her marriage and her later return to Shelleys childhood home, risks fuelling a deeply conservative fantasy that the events of Marys life were inevitable all along. Sampson tries to rescue her from such patriarchal determinism by structuring her biography as a series of choppy freeze frames, static painterly tableaux in Marys life around which she traces the run-up and fall-out. Chapters are centred around, for example, a tragically illusoryscene in which Wollstonecraft presents Godwin with a healthy baby, lit by oil lamps like a study of the Holy Family by Rembrandt; or, 17 years later, the moment when the writer Thomas Jefferson Hogg witnesses a tartan-clad teenage Mary appear behind a door and Percy Shelley darts out of the room, like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king; and the most famous tableau of Marys life, as she and Percy sit in the drawing room of Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, shortly before the challenge to write a ghost story is issued. The freeze frame structure allows Sampson to gloss over periods of life that she considers largely superfluous to the meat of Marys intellectual achievements, particularly the later years that dont contribute to the writing of Frankenstein. But this methodology this sifting of a life according to moments that posterity has deemed consequential sits awkwardly at odds with Sampsons self-stated biographers duty to hugely enlarge Mary and try to comprehend her. So when, for example, Mary, Percy, Claire and their children set out for a continental trip in 1818, and we are warned that four years from now all three of the infants who make that rough March crossing of the English Channel will be dead of infectious diseases, we are abruptly disconnected from Marys inner life and brought closer, instead, to the biographers position of retrospective knowledge. Despite her aims to understand Marys thoughts and motivations, Sampson herself a poet, editor of Percy Shelleys poetry and literary critic is acutely aware of the limitations of inner life biography. Early in In Search of Mary Shelley, she considers the importance of mirrors: the stepsister in whom Mary saw herself reflected and distorted; the necessity of the blind side that transforms a sheet of glass into a mirror; and the advent of the Spiegelkabinett, the specially arranged German mirror cabinets that dared users to discover a hitherto unsuspected ugliness (a metaphor for the Romantics discovery of the irrational, unruly subconscious lurking behind the apparent serenity of the conscious, rational mind). Biography, too, is a form of mirror. It both reflects and distorts, not only its subject, but the biographer too. Biographers are the blind side to the reflection, the Frankenstein to the pieced-together creature. In 1835, Mary reflected on how the true end of biography was to deduce the peculiar character of the man from the minute, yet characteristic details that punctuated the life: from the specifics of place and clothing and bodily experience in which Sampsons biography excels. And it is their shared faith in biography as a valuable exploration of character, despite the imperfections of the genre, that is perhaps what brings Sampson closest in her search for Mary Shelley. - Rachel Hewitt.
Kirkus Review
A fresh biography of Mary Shelley (1797-1851), who created the monster that has become "part of our shared imagination."Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died just after she was born, leaving her and her older, illegitimate sister, Fanny, to be raised by her father, William Godwin. Since her parents were two of the leading political philosophers of the time, Mary received a fine education in the humanities, developing her reasoning skills. Godwin was also an anarchist and utilitarian who seemed to approve of the Romantic poets and free loveexcept for Percy Shelley. As his protg, Shelley met Mary when she was 16, and he was married with a pregnant wife. They soon ran off to Europe and took Mary's stepsister, Jane, with them. Throughout the marriage, they shared their talents and supported and encouraged each other. But Shelley handled money poorly, and they soon had to return to London to the first of innumerable homes throughout Europe. Jane, who soon changed her name to Claire, met and fell for Lord Byron and persuaded Percy and Mary to meet up with him at Lake Geneva. As Sampson (Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form, 2016, etc.) shows in this perceptive biography, it was there that Frankenstein was born, with Byron's challenge to write ghost stories. Begun when she was 19, Mary's novel, often considered the first work of science fiction, was finished and published before she was 21. With it, she changed the face of fiction, revealing the experimental spirit of the Romantic period. Unfortunately, their marriage was also experimental and filled with inequities. Shelley was a firm believer in free love, particularly for himself. After a series of pregnancies and only one surviving child, Mary still believed in their love, even more so after his death. Throughout, Sampson demonstrates why the story of Shelley and Frankenstein remains so intriguing, even today.The author deftly plumbs the depths of Mary's psyche to enlighten us about both Shelleys and reveal the profound effects they had on each other. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Poet and classically trained violinist -Sampson (The Catch) brings a luminous vision to her new biography of Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Too often, studies of Shelley intended for wide readerships-as this book is-lean too heavily on reader response criticism and focus on Frankenstein's creature as a cultural icon, at the expense of representing Shelley's story. Sampson valuably addresses why Frankenstein possesses such enduring power: the monster "lets us play with the anxieties we have about human nature itself" on the screen. On the page, there is more, for the narrative forces readers to "choose between two truths." The moral ambiguities of the novel and its later incarnations provide a significant subtext to Sampson's well-researched contribution to research on Shelley's life and times. Shelley "forced open the space for herself in which to write," notes Sampson, and left behind a huge blueprint for "writing women, for the always emerging, always creative, scientific imagination and for the dreams and nightmares of the Western world," a truth as necessary for us now as it was during the 19th century. VERDICT Highly recommended for general readers interested in women's writing and literary history.-Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgements | p. ix |
| List of Illustrations | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Part 1 The Instruments of Life | |
| 1 The Instruments of Life | p. 11 |
| 2 Learning to Look | p. 29 |
| 3 Through a Door Partly Opened | p. 54 |
| 4 Elopement | p. 75 |
| 5 Becoming a Couple | p. 97 |
| 6 At Villa Diodati | p. 118 |
| 7 A Young Writer | p. 137 |
| 8 Emigrants | p. 160 |
| Part 2 Borne Away by the Waves | |
| 9 Le rêve est fini | p. 185 |
| 10 The Mona Lisa Smile | p. 213 |
| Coda | p. 240 |
| Notes | p. 251 |
| Further Reading | p. 292 |
| Index | p. 295 |