Customer Reviews

Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters

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This book is an excellent text for the study of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. It will fascinate those interested in the life of Mary Shelley, students studying Frankenstein, and those interested in learning about an 19th Century woman writer, who wrote a novel about a monster that has since become a universal archetype of isolation and societal rejection. In this text, it is demonstrated how events in Mary Shelley's life, her fears of motherhood, and her study of current philosophic and scientific theories all contributed to the development of the novel. Mary Shelley is proven to be an intelligent and complex woman writer of the Romantic Literary tradition

This is an excellent biography of Mary Shelley, author of the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

At the outset, biographer Anne K. Mellor provides a helpful and thorough chronology of Mary Shelley's life from her birth in 1797 to her death in 1851.

Mellor then proceeds to write a scholarly, fascinating, well organized, and clearly written study of Mary Shelley's life.

I read it because of my interest in Frankenstein as a study in the effects of unrepaired shame on human development. Mellor devotes several chapters to Frankenstein including: Making a Monster, My Hideous Progeny, and Revising Frankenstein. Mellor also includes an Appendix: Percy Shelley's Revision of the Manuscript of Frankenstein.

As Mellor notes in her Preface, "Frankenstein is rapidly becoming an essential text for our exploration of female consciousness and literary technique."

I highly recommend this book.

This book captures every aspect of Mary Shelley's life that evolved into her fictive imagination. The readers are introduced to much less popular works such as The Last Man, Lodore and Mathilda which actually give a unique perspective to Frankenstein. For myself there were some places I felt I was given too many examples, I had already figured out Mellor's point several paragraphs before, but the book makes every possible attempt to explain the novels so that everyone understands.