Author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays and reviews, Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of "Frankenstein", as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. This collection of essays aims to offer a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley, emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. The book brings fresh insight to the life and work of an often neglected or misunderstood writer who, the editors remind us, spent nearly three decades at the centre of England's literary world during the country's profound transition between the Romantic and Victorian eras. The essays in the volume demonstrate the importance of Mary Shelley's neglected novels, including "Matilda", "Valperga", "The Last Man" and "Falkner". Other topics include Mary Shelley's work in various literary genres, her editing of her husband's poetry and prose, her politics and her trajectory as a female writer.
The book is intended to advance Mary Shelley studies to a new level of discourse and raise important issues for English Romanticism and women's studies.