A Life with Mary Shelley

This title examines Mary Shelley's life (1797–1851) and work (Frankenstein) through the lens of her prominent family and friends, and is a nod to the New York Public Library's Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. The late Johnson (English, comparative literature, Harvard Univ.) was one of the handful of scholars responsible for bringing Mary Shelley and her work to the prominence that they enjoy today. Shelley had, until articles published by Johnson and her colleagues in the 1980s, been overlooked as no more than an appendage to the two eminent contemporary thinkers and writers who were her parents—Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin—and to the famous Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she married. Here Butler (Maxine Elliott Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, Univ. of California, Berkley) and Felman (Robert Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French, Emory Univ.) compile those seminal articles, including previously unpublished pieces. There are also analyses of and reflections upon Johnson's Shelley-related oeuvre, written by some of the feminist-theory scholars who, with Johnson, brought Shelley and her writing to renown.