Mary Shelley, Miranda Seymour
Mary Shelley, Miranda Seymour
List: $38.99 | Sale: $27.30
Club: $19.49

Mary Shelley

Author: Miranda Seymour

Narrator: Sandra Duncan

Unabridged: 27 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/15/2019

Synopsis

‘The most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade…' – Financial Times

‘To be savoured for its vivid and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times of the gifted Mary Shelley’ – Times Literary Supplement

‘Brilliant and enthralling' – Independent On Sunday

'Wonderfully vivid' – Spectator

The definitive and richly woven biography of Mary Shelley, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein
 
The creator of the world’s most famous outsider became one herself . . .

There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From that emerged Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations for two hundred years.
 
Miranda Seymour illustrates the rich and unexplored life of Mary Shelley. Everything from her childhood to her tempestuous relationship with Percy Shelley; Seymour brings to life the brilliant mind that created Frankenstein through unexplored and intriguing sources. 
 
The Mary Shelley we meet here is a woman we can engage with and understand. Her world, so rich in its settings and its cast of characters, seems drawn from a novel. She, at its centre, is flawed, brave, generous, and impetuous, a woman whose dark and brilliant imagination gave us a myth which seems ever more potent in our own era.

About Miranda Seymour

Miranda Seymour, author of the award-winning In My Father's House has written many acclaimed novels and biographies, including lives of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves, Ottoline Morrell and Helle Nice, the Bugatti Queen.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Sean Barrs on March 07, 2021

I find the fact that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was only 17 years old truly extraordinary. Never again in her writing career would she be able to reach such intellectual and philosophical depth in her work. The truth is, she would not even come close to the greatness of her first novel......more

Goodreads review by Wealhtheow on July 16, 2010

Mary Wollstonecraft was a passionately political woman; her essays A Vindication of the Rights of Man and its follow up, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, made her justly famous, particularly in intellectual circles. After a disastrous love affair (from which issued A Short Residence in Sweden N......more

Goodreads review by Brian on June 26, 2019

Certainly the most definitive biography of Mary Shelley available, Seymour covers all of the bases with literary flair. I walk away thinking we perhaps will never truly know Mary Shelley, and the tragedy of her life is not that her husband died so early, but that Mary had to live through 30 years of......more

Goodreads review by Mae on September 04, 2020

REREADING 2020 Reading for Notes Fall/Winter 2020 The Definite Biography of Mary Shelley. More to say later. (first read) (Second read) Mary Shelley is a very interesting person and I have a lot of admiration for her, both as a human being and writer. That said, I definitely fall into the Percy Shelley......more

Goodreads review by Alan on May 26, 2021

A heavy tome. It's a shame Miranda Seymour didn't like her subject more. She made it tedious and unpleasant to be in the company of her subject and her companions. While the research is impressive, it is lacking in narrative verve. Seymour knows how to line up her facts and dates in a row although s......more

Quotes

‘The most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade… Here, for the first time, Shelley steps off the page as a living, thinking, suffering woman, fraught and caught in the web of her own intelligence.’

‘To be savoured for its vivid and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times of the gifted Mary Shelley.’

‘Brilliant and enthralling, this portrait illuminates Mary’s life in many unexpected ways.’

‘A wonderfully vivid, human and learned portrait of the woman who created Frankenstein, married Shelley, and, amazingly, survived.’

'Mary Shelley, Miranda Seymour’s affectionate and well-written biography, concisely sketches the background of scientific inquiry that influenced Shelley’s early intellectual development… Seymour keenly brings out how fraught Mary Shelley’s own life was with tragedies of childbirth and infant mortality… In 1818, the Shelleys moved to Italy…where Byron now was. They formed a tense and inbred circle, sharply evoked by Seymour: the women eyeing each other jealously, each serially or simultaneously in love with Shelley or Byron or both… Miranda Seymour is a novelist as well as an experienced biographer… She has vivid narrative gifts and a perceptive understanding of the main personalities.'

'Splendid biography.'

'Miranda Seymour’s lucid biography arrives as the general reader’s guide to Mary Shelley’s ascent to academic cult status… Seymour is persuasive.'

'Gracefully sweeping through the dramatic life of the woman behind history’s most legendary monster, Miranda Seymour unbuttons a world of brilliant literary figures in Mary Shelley and re-creates the imaginative time in which Frankenstein was born… The Mary we meet here, brilliantly brought to life by Seymour from previously unexplored sources, is flawed, brave, generous, and impetuous.'

'I envy any reader of this excellent biography who happens not to be very familiar with the lives of Shelley and the girl who eloped with him when she was sixteen.'

'The most thorough account of Shelley’s life…eminently readable.'

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