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Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2015

    $23.11
Synopsis

As Read On BBC Radio 4. A gripping account of the heartbreaks and triumphs of two of history's most formidable female intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Gordon has reunited mother and daughter through biography, beautifully weaving their narratives for the first time. (Amanda Foreman English feminist). Mary Wollstonecraft and author Mary Shelley were mother and daughter, yet these two extraordinary women never knew one another. Nevertheless, their passionate and pioneering lives remained closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies eerily similar. Both Marys became famous writers, fell in love with brilliant but impossible men, and were single mothers out of wedlock; both lived in exile, fought for their position in society and thought deeply about how we should live. They also broke every rigid convention thrust upon them: Wollstonecraft chased pirates in Scandinavia and sailed to Paris to witness the Revolution. Shelley eloped in a fishing boat with a married man and faced down bandits in Naples. Wollstonecraft proclaimed that women's liberty should matter to everyone. Not only did Wollstonecraft pen the landmark book, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her work ignited Romanticism, inspiring a whole new generation of writers, including her daughter. At just nineteen years old, Mary travelled around Italy with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and there wrote Frankenstein. Having pushed the boundaries of the literary form, she went on to become the editor of her husband's poetry - a feat of scholarship that established his posthumous reputation. For the first time, Romantic Outlaws brings together a pair of visionary women who should have shared a life, but who instead share a powerful literary and feminist legacy. This is inventive, illuminating, involving biography at its best.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 672
 Publisher: Hutchinson
Published: 23 Apr 2015
ISBN 10: 0091958946
ISBN 13: 9780091958947
Book Overview: Inventive, page-turning, involving biography at its best. Romantic Outlaws is the first book to tell the story of the passionate and pioneering lives of Mary Wollstonecraft - English feminist and author of the landmark book, The Vindication of the Rights of Women - and her novelist daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

Media Reviews
[A] unique double biography... An excellent and poignant book whose heroines breathe in its pages. -- David Aaronovitch The Times A mother and daughter who changed not only the way we think, but the way we are... extraordinary women, a dozen decades ahead of their time... Romantic Outlaws enables readers to compare the different ways in which these two remarkable women confronted their tragically different destinies... [A] thoughtful, intelligent, deeply-felt book' -- Miranda Seymour Sunday Times A gripping account of the heartbreaks and triumphs of two of history's most formidable female intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Gordon has reunited mother and daughter through biography, beautifully weaving their narratives for the first time. -- Amanda Foreman author of A World on Fire Full of enriching paradox... Charlotte Gordon has managed to produce that rare thing, a work of genuinely popular history... It works beautifully. -- Melissa Benn New Statesman Wollstonecraft and Shelley were extraordinary women who led sensational lives. They were Romantic revolutionaries... retelling their story cannot fail to captivate and provoke. Spectator Unique... Marvellous, passionate stuff. -- David Aaronovitch Books of the Year, Times An exceptional achievement -- Michael Morpugo Daily Telegraph An innovative dual biography that foregrounds the writing of two women who disregarded the moral codes of their eras and shaped their own destinies. Gordon's parallel mapping of their lives reveals fascinating similarities in the ways writing sustained, and sometimes saved, them both. Financial Times Mother and daughter shadow and reveal each other. The retelling emphasises the extent to which Shelley's life was shaped by her mother's legacy but here is underlined in thought-provoking ways... In Gordon's narrative, [Wollstonecraft and Shelley] appear at their best and bravest. -- Daisy Hay Observer A most welcome deeper take on the women who scandalized Victorian England - and whose stories continue to resonate today. Vogue The relationship between Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft is explored with remarkable insight and perspicacity in this exhilarating dual biography... Gordon's lucid prose and multi-faceted appraisal... makes warm-blooded and fully fleshed-out people of writers who exist for readers today only as the literary works they left behind. *Starred* Publisher's Weekly Charlotte Gordon reunites a mother and daughter tragically separated at birth in this rousing and surpassingly readable epic spanning the Romantic era. Wordsworth and Byron must step aside to make room for two brilliant women, Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, early and late Romantics whose remarkable contributions to their time and ours lend Gordon's artfully twined tale special significance -- Megan Marshall Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and The Peabody Sisters Gordon infuses literary history with electrifying discoveries in this symbiotic portrait of radical mother-daughter writers who indelibly changed society and the arts... Gordon chronicles their harsh, tragic, and courageous lives in alternating chapters that are as emotionally incisive as they are finely particularized in their astute renderings of tumultuous settings and dire predicaments... She delivers overdue justice to two... thinkers and writers who risked everything to protest in word and deed crimes and discrimination against women. *Starred* Booklist Charlotte Gordon's fascinating double biography [of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley]... is a skilful interweaving of the two stories... [It] presents a compelling comparison of their struggles, adventures, romantic entanglements and, ultimately, the uniquely personal philosophies that helped to shape the writings for which they are best remembered...' -- Hallie Rubenhold BBC History Magazine Fascinating... The accumulated detail of places, characters and historical events gives these two lives a hallucinatory realism. -- Lynn Roberts Books of the Year, Tablet
Author Bio
Charlotte Gordon is a prize-winning poet and biographer. She received her undergraduate degree in English and American Literature from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Boston University. Since 1986, she has taught creative writing, history, literature, religion, and theatre. Her poetry has won many prizes, including a Robert Penn Warren Award. Her biography of the seventeenth-century poet, Anne Bradstreet, Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America's First Poet won a Massachusetts Book Award for non-fiction.