Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Writing Lives

Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, Anne McWhir, Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, Anne McWhir

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780889209435
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Pioneers in life writing, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818 ), are now widely regarded as two of the leading writers of the Romantic period. They are both responsible for opening up new possibilities for women in genres traditionally dominated by men.

This volume brings together essays on Wollstonecraft's and Shelley's life writing by some of the most prominent scholars in Canada, Australia, and the United States. It also includes a full-length play by award-winning Canadian playwright Rose Scollard. Together, the essays and the play explore the connections between mother and daughter, between writing and life, and between criticism and creation. They offer a new understanding of two important writers, of a literary period, and of emergent modes of life writing.

Essayists include Judith Barbour, Betty T. Bennett, Anne K. Mellor, Charles E. Robinson, Eleanor Ty, and Lisa Vargo. Among the works discussed are Wollstonecraft's Vindication, Letters from Norway, and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman; William Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft; and Shelley's Frankenstein, The Last Man, Ladore, and Rambles in Germany and Italy.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• The Politics of Autobiography in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
• The Personal Pronoun as Political: Stylistics of Self-Reference in the Vindications
• The Power of the Unnamed You in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
• Reveries of Reality: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Poetics of Sensibility
• “The History of My Own Heart”: Inscribing Self, Inscribing Desire in Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway
• (Un)Confinements: The Madness of Motherhood in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman
• Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Jacobs: Self Possessions
• Memoirs Discourse and William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• A Mother’s Daughter: An Intersection of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Mary Shelley: Writing/Other Women in Godwin’s Life
• “Unconceiving Marble”: Anatomy and Animation in Frankenstein and The Last Man
• Further Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: Lodore as an Imagined Conversation with Mary Wollstonecraft
• Speaking the Unspeakable: Art Criticism as Life Writing in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy
• Biographical Imaginings and Mary Shelley’s (Extant and Missing) Correspondence
• Reflections on Writing Mary Shelley’s Life
• Caves of Fancy
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index