Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Shelley
-
Standard Name: Shelley, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
Married Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Pseudonym: Mary S.
Pseudonym: Mrs Caroline Barnard
MS
, long known almost exclusively for Frankenstein, is now being read for her later novels and her plays, as well as for her journals and letters. Her editing, reviewing, biographical, and journalistic work entitle her to the designation woman of letters. She is an important figure among women Romantics, and a channel for the reformist ideals of the 1790s forwards into the Victorian era.
MS
published her first solo book, the biographical study Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Rees, David. Muriel Spark, William Trevor, Ian McEwan, A Bibliography of their First Editions. Colophon Press.
7
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
MS
published My Best Mary: The Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, which she edited together with Derek Stanford
.
The half-title wrongly lists MS
as editor of a complete edition of Shelley's The Last Man.
Rees, David. Muriel Spark, William Trevor, Ian McEwan, A Bibliography of their First Editions. Colophon Press.
20
Rees, David. Muriel Spark, William Trevor, Ian McEwan, A Bibliography of their First Editions. Colophon Press.
20
Textual Features
Elizabeth Fenton
Fenton sets out to paint a a familiar picture of the everyday occurrences, manners, and habits of life of persons undistinguished either by wealth or fame
Fenton, Elizabeth. The Journal of Mrs. Fenton. Editor Lawrence, Sir Henry, Edward Arnold.
1-2
in British India. But this is largely unfulfilled...
Textual Features
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
's selection, though, demonstrates a serious interest in women's literary and feminist history. Of the selections whose authors can be identified, almost half are women. Though Marguerite, Lady Blessington
, doyenne of the albums...
Textual Features
Sophia King
This novel about the genesis of evil is told in the first person by its wicked yet pitiable male narrator, presented as a man of strong intellect and strong feeling, whose first words are What...
Textual Features
Jane Loudon
This strikingly inventive and ingenious tale seems to owe a good deal to Mary Shelley
's Frankenstein (though Shelley receives no tribute in passing, as do R. B. Sheridan
, Byron
, and especially Scott
Textual Features
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
In another letter MEC
notes that she found the writing of Sara Coleridge
(her cousin) and Mary Shelley
intensely Englishwomanly.
Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth. Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge. Editor Sichel, Edith, Constable.
219
She concedes that both these writers possess the gift of imagination, but is not...
MRM
's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...
Textual Features
Maureen Duffy
MD
's protagonist here is a being created by experiment, half-man, half-gorilla, a person of two worlds, animal and human.
Duffy, Maureen. That’s How It Was. Virago.
x
This story translates into speciesism the classism which Duffy says she has always lived...
Another Freak, also published in MAD
's collection Some Women's Ways, is reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Short Stories by Women (1998) alongside works by both well-known and obscure authors, including Maria Edgeworth
, Mary Shelley
Publishing
Muriel Spark
Alan Pryce-Jones
, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, commissioned MS
for a middle page on Mary Shelley
before her book appeared. Spark also gave a talk on Shelley for the BBC
Third Programme...
Performance of text
Liz Lochhead
Lochhead has reworked this play (about Mary Shelley
's creation of Frankenstein) several times. A revised version was performed at the EdinburghFringe Festival
by the Traverse Theatre Club
under the new title Blood...
Occupation
William Harrison Ainsworth
The son of a solicitor, he entered the same profession but left to pursue his literary ambitions. He wrote many historical novels. As editor or proprietor of Bentley's Magazine, Ainsworth's Magazine, and the...
