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In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson

In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson
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In the summer of 1816, two English Romantic poets, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, met up in a house overlooking Lake Geneva, said John Carey in The Sunday Times. Also present were Byron’s doctor, John William Polidori, and 18-year-old Mary Godwin, who was living with Shelley. “Byron suggested they should each write a ghost story, and though he and Percy did not bother to finish theirs, Polidori and Mary did.” With his novella The Vampyre, Polidori created a new fictional genre, while with Frankenstein, published 200 years ago this month, Mary Shelley (as she became after marrying the poet) created one of the most enduring modern myths – about a scientist who plays God, and the intelligent “creature” that he stitches together in his lab. Still a teenager, Shelley had written a “masterpiece” of “worldwide” importance. In her probing biography, Fiona Sampson examines what made this possible.

Her answer begins with the “horror show” of Mary’s birth, said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. Just 11 days after Mary was born, her mother, the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died from an infection caused by a doctor removing the “afterbirth bit by bit with his unsterile hands”. Sampson suggests this event – which Shelley’s father, the radical political thinker William Godwin, recounted in a memoir – influenced the “weird nativity” of Frankenstein. Shelley’s short life had been full of “intensely corporeal changes”, said Rachel Hewitt in The Guardian. At the “onset of puberty”, a mystery infection caused one of her arms to swell up “like a monstrous appendage”. By the time she began Frankenstein, she had – after eloping with Percy in 1814 – suffered at least one miscarriage and given birth to two children (one of whom died after being born prematurely). She knew, Sampson writes, that “the creation of life is costly”.

Despite her genius, Shelley was overshadowed during her own life and afterwards by the “reputations of her flamboyant parents and spouse”, said Ruth Scurr in the Financial Times. Sampson’s attempt to address this injustice “succeeds intermittently in bringing Mary closer to us”. This is a “gripping” and “fascinating” biography, said Paula Byrne in The Times, though it becomes less interesting as its subject ages. (After Percy’s death in 1822, Shelley lived on, much less eventfully, till 1851.) What still seems “extraordinary” is Shelley’s precocity in creating her most famous work. “That the author was a teenage girl upstaging Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.”