Edward Everett Root Publishers Co. Ltd.
EER
About this book
This new book offers a feminist reappraisal of Mary Shelley (1797-1851) that includes but also goes beyond Frankenstein (1818) to consider a selection of her novels, short fiction, poetry, and life writing from a career that spanned nearly three decades.
By comparing Shelley’s early and late publications, putting her in dialogue with her bestselling female contemporaries, and drawing on archival material to contextualise her contributions to the periodical press, this study reveals previously unseen continuities in her work and affinities with other women writers.
It acknowledges Shelley’s illustrious parentage, marriage, and social circle without making these biographical contexts the master keys to interpreting her work. Instead, the book pays close attention to the strategies Shelley developed to navigate political, personal, and financial constraints whilst posing challenges to the ideologies and practices that oppress women and undermine social progress. These strategies include her use of covertly transgressive female characters, her innovations in narrative structure, her attention to women’s relationships, her complex and varied deployment of auto/biographical material, and her unrelenting emphasis on sympathy and sociality.
Finally, the book turns to Mary Shelley’s ‘afterlives’, exploring her status and significance as a popular writer both in her time and in ours. The book argues for Shelley as a lifelong critic of the patriarchy whose full literary and political importance is best appreciated through a multimodal study of her work.
About the author
Dr. Susan Civale is Reader in Romanticism at Canterbury Christ Church University, and Co-director for the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers (ICVWW). Her research interests include life writing, women’s writing, gothic literature, and authorial and textual afterlives, both in the ‘long’ nineteenth century and beyond. She is the author of Romantic Women’s Life Writing: Reputation and Afterlife (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).
Available 2025
Mary Shelley
Susan Civale
ISBN 9781915115676 Hardback £55.00 Order
ISBN 9781915115683 Paperback £29.99 Order
ISBN 9781915115690 eBook £29.99 Order
216 x 140 mm. c. 230 pp.
Key Popular Women Writers series no. 10