The definitive and richly woven biography of Mary Shelley. The creator of the world’s most famous outsider became one herself . . .
Miranda Seymour illustrates the rich and unexplored life of Mary Shelley.
Everything from Mary’s childhood to her tempestuous relationship with Percy Shelley; Miranda Seymour brings to life the brilliant mind that created Frankenstein through unexplored and intriguing sources. The Mary Shelley we meet here is a woman we can engage with and understand. Her world, so rich in its settings and its cast of characters, seems drawn from a novel. She, at its centre, is flawed, brave, generous, and impetuous, a woman whose dark and brilliant imagination gave us a myth which seems ever more potent in our own era.
There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From that emerged Frankenstein’s monster, who has haunted imaginations for two hundred years.
‘To be savoured for its vivid and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times of the gifted Mary Shelley’ TLS
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