{"id":1579,"date":"2018-11-05T12:08:27","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T17:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/?p=1579"},"modified":"2018-10-08T20:10:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T00:10:24","slug":"book-review-in-search-of-mary-shelley-the-girl-who-wrote-frankenstein-by-fiona-sampson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/?p=1579","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein<\/em>\u00a0by Fiona Sampson<\/p>\n

Pegasus Books, 2018<\/p>\n

ISBN-13: 978-1681777528<\/p>\n

Available: Hardcover, used paperback, Kindle edition,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We know Mary Shelley as the daughter of revolutionary writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and muse and wife to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who as a teenage girl who wrote\u00a0Frankenstein,\u00a0<\/em>but beyond the anecdote of the challenge to write a ghost story issued one night at the Villa Diodati. But we don\u2019t really KNOW her, beyond the facts of her life.\u00a0 Somehow, her own life and thoughts have been passed over in favor of her companions, and we have been mostly left with the myth of Frankenstein\u2019s creation, and the many permutations of her novel that have capitalized on it.<\/p>\n

In this biography, Fiona Sampson aims to capture the \u201creal\u201d Mary, through her letters, journals, and publications, those of her friends, family, and colleagues, and recreating the context of the time she lived in and how that affected her, from the reading she chose, to the effects of changing climate and the development of electricity.\u00a0 During the short time she was with Shelley, Mary was pregnant five times. Three of her children died at a young age, and she miscarried a fourth. During the same time period, her half-sister Fanny and Percy\u2019s legitimate wife Harriet both committed suicide.\u00a0 Intense and intellectual to begin with, Mary dealt with difficult emotions like grief and guilt as well as physical problems while still taking responsibility for the mercurial Shelley\u2019s welfare, and completing and publishing a book. These are the facts of Mary\u2019s life with Shelley, but Mary\u2019s life did not end when Shelley\u2019s did\u2013 and throughout her life, she was a survivor. Sampson has taken an unusual and effective approach to her subject, taking a \u201cclose-up\u201d of who Mary Shelley was and how she became that person, a young woman who, surrounded by great men, \u201cforced open the space for herself in which to write\u201d and because of that, was later able to establish a literary life of her own.<\/p>\n

While not a complete look at the Shelleys and their friends and family, the zoom-in focus on Mary Shelley makes this a worthwhile, and fascinating read. Recommended for adult library collections<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein\u00a0by Fiona Sampson Pegasus Books, 2018 ISBN-13: 978-1681777528 Available: Hardcover, used paperback, Kindle edition,   We know Mary Shelley as the daughter of revolutionary writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and muse and wife to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who as a teenage girl who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,119,288],"tags":[292],"class_list":["post-1579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-horror","category-nonfiction","tag-mary-shelley"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3Eu9f-pt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1580,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions\/1580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}