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| 1831 illustration from Frankenstein |
"I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection." Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Chapter 15
I have struggled for days now, endeavoring to put my feelings into words. I read over 500 pages in four days, staying up late into the night, negligent of the time, enraptured by these people. And now four days have passed and I still cannot find my tongue--what language can frame the whirling images and restless feelings that trouble my dreams?
What can I do? Offer names, dates, and events to create thin, ghostly images without substance? Reduce passions and sufferings to a few scratches on a virtual page? It is impossible to limn the characters who lived and breathed in these pages with mere words. No! I must tell my impressions, how what I have read has brought out in my emotions, aroused my sensibilities.
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These brilliant and iconoclastic women embraced ideals that made them social outcasts. They fell hard for men who broke their hearts. They both spent time as outcast, single mothers of illegitimate children. They believed--gasp--that women were equal to men in intelligence and potential; they eschewed the marriage market that sold women's love for four-in-hand carriages and a large pin allowance. They actually believed that women should work and earn their own support--they were against marriage--and they believed they had found soul-mates with whom they could share spiritual, intellectual, and sexual love.
Mary Wollstonecraft is known as the philosopher who first championed equal rights and opportunities for women. Her Letters Written From Sweden introduced a personal element into travel writing. (Robert Louis Stevenson took his battered copy with him to Samoa.) She had a brilliant mind, deep passions, and high ideals. She stayed in France during the revolution. After a torrid love affair ended badly she had to fend for herself and her daughter Fanny. William Godwin, a political reformer and novelist, came into her life. They were intellectual equals, philosophically compatible, and complete opposites in personality. Neither believed in marriage, but went through the formalities when Mary became pregnant. Five months later Mary Godwin (later Shelley) was born; her mother died from complications of childbirth leaving a bereaved husband and two daughters.
Mary Shelley was two years old when her father was visited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the first generation Romantic poets. Coleridge was well loved and told the girls spellbinding stories. After he returned to his home, Mary and her half-sister Fanny missed him. After their father remarried Coleridge visited again. The girls were sent to bed by their evil stepmother, but they surreptitiously crept back into their father's study to hear Coleridge recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The poem became imprinted on Mary's mind for life; its influence can be seen in her novel Frankenstein: the tormented outcasts, the suffering for sins against nature, the awesome settings of mountains, ice, and tumultuous seas.
At sixteen Mary fell in love with 21-year-old poet Percy Shelley. His father did not approve, so they ran away together. Theirs was the ideal Romantic romance, but it ended seven years later with Shelley's death.
I appreciated Gordon's setting them in context of the shifting cultural background, from Enlightenment, through the French Revolution, to the flowering of the Romantic era, and finally against the Victorian age. The book is well illustrated throughout with portraits of all the major players. I didn't have to Goggle them! The book was intellectual stimulating and told the stories of two great romances. It's the whole package.
I received a free ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Romantic Outlaws: the extraordinary lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
by Charlotte Gordon
Random House
Publication Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 9781400068425
$30.00 hard cover
