Thoughts on Mary Shelley
Today is the birthday of Mary Shelley, born August 30 1797, one of the icons of feminism and the Romantic age. There's a huge resource of material on Mary and her relationships with the other great names of the Romantic era, people who were friends, lovers, collaborators. You can find her works online here . The most recent book I read about Mary and her circle was Young Romantics by Daisy May, which concentrated on the relationships between the Shelleys, Byron, and figures such as the lesser known Leigh Hunt and the Cockney Poets, now coming back into scholars' radar. Mary, who lived for almost three decades after Percy's death, has had the reputation until recently of the scholarly widow who abandoned her youthful radicalism and devoted her life to the works of her late husband, thereby doing a cleanup act on him: The qualities that struck any one newly introduced to Shelley, were, first, a gentle and cordial goodness that animated his intercourse with warm affection, a...