In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein (Ebook)
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Mary Shelley as never before - a new biography that shows the woman behind Frankenstein
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2018
'If we get another literary biography in 2018 as astute and feelingful as this one, we shall be lucky.' - John Carey, Sunday Times
Mary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe, as she coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life forever. Most astonishingly, it was while she was still a teenager that Mary composed her canonical novel Frankenstein, creating two of our most enduring archetypes today.
The life story is well-known. But who was the woman who lived it? She's left plenty of evidence, and in this fascinating dialogue with the past, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. She uncovers a complex, generous character - friend, intellectual, lover and mother - trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly.
Published for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this is a major new work of biography by a prize-winning writer and poet.
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein (Paperback)
Buy from
Mary Shelley as never before - a new biography that shows the woman behind Frankenstein
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2018
'If we get another literary biography in 2018 as astute and feelingful as this one, we shall be lucky.' - John Carey, Sunday Times
Mary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe, as she coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life forever. Most astonishingly, it was while she was still a teenager that Mary composed her canonical novel Frankenstein, creating two of our most enduring archetypes today.
The life story is well-known. But who was the woman who lived it? She's left plenty of evidence, and in this fascinating dialogue with the past, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. She uncovers a complex, generous character - friend, intellectual, lover and mother - trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly.
Published for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this is a major new work of biography by a prize-winning writer and poet.
Reviews for In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
John Carey Sunday Times
The Times
Observer
Guardian
Daily Mail
Irish Times
Herald
Elaine Showalter Spectator
The i
Catholic Herald
Fiona Sampson
Fiona Sampson is a leading poet and writer, published in thirty-eight languages. Her twenty-seven books include eight poetry collections, an edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the critically acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley. Broadcaster, critic and literary translator, she was editor of Poetry Review 2005_12 and is Emeritus Professor, University of Roehampton. Sampson is a Fellow ofthe Royal Society of Literature and the WordsworthTrust and a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund; her honours include an MBE for services to literature,the Newdigate Prize, Cholmondeley Award, Hawthornden Fellowship, and multiple awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales, Society of Authors, Poetry Book Society and Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has
received international awards in the US, India, North Macedonia, Albania and Bosnia. She lives in an old Herefordshire farmhouse not far from Elizabeth's beloved Hope End and is at work on a book about the Romantics' rural legacy.
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