Romantic Outlaws takes the reader on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England to explore in this ground-breaking dual biography of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the author who wrote Frankenstein - mother and daughter - a pair of visionary women, who should have shared a life, but who instead share a powerful literary and feminist legacy. Nevertheless, their passionate and pioneering lives remained closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies eerily similar.īoth women became famous writers and wrote books that changed literary history, had passionate relationships with several men, were single mothers out of wedlock both lived in exile, fought for their position in society, and interrogated ideas of how we should live. Gordon has reunited mother and daughter through biography, beautifully weaving their narratives for the first time.' Amanda ForemanĮnglish feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and author Mary Shelley were mother and daughter, yet these two extraordinary women never knew one another. 'A gripping account of the heartbreaks and triumphs of two of history's most formidable female intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Gordon suggests convincingly that Mary’s shock at Godwin’s rejection, her sense of motherlessness, and her abhorrence of man’s craving for boundless power, found artistic expression in her novel Frankenstein, a work begun in the summer of 1816 on Lake Geneva in the company of Shelley, Byron, and others.NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER To Mary’s dismayed surprise, her father, once an advocate of free love, broke off communication with her-though he continued to pester Shelley for money. The couple took along Mary’s stepsister, Claire, the result being that the ménage and its companions, which included Lord Byron and other writers and exotics, were labeled a “league of incest” by scandalized observers. Gordon is a Mary Shelley expert and the author of Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley. At 16, Mary ran off with the married, 21-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley grew up nourished by her mother’s writings and happy enough until her father married a woman who came with two daughters and a predisposition to snub Mary and Fanny. Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Charlotte Gordons biography of the pioneering feminist and her novelist daughter. She died of puerperal fever 11 days after the birth of Mary, leaving Godwin with the infant and her half-sister Fanny. Though the couple had individually opposed marriage in their writings, they entered it because Wollstonecraft, pregnant again, hoped to escape further castigation of herself and her unborn child.

An unhappy affair produced a daughter, Fanny, and left Wollstonecraft socially ostracized, a condition only partly ameliorated by her marriage to William Godwin.

Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon