Mary Shelley
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Audible Standard 30-day free trial
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for £5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Mary Shelley
Narrated by:
Sandra Duncan
Buy Now for £16.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Sandra Duncan
-
By:
-
Miranda Seymour
About this listen
‘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.
Critic reviews
‘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.’ (Jackie Wullschlager)
‘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.' (New York Times Notable Books)
'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.' (Diana Athill)
'The most thorough account of Shelley’s life…eminently readable.'
'A harrowing life, wonderfully retold.' (Washington Post Best Books of the Year)
'Seymour is adept at capturing the cultural climate and social context of the early nineteenth century in the major English and Italian settings of Shelley’s life story. She has done hard and valuable work in finely combining the correspondence of the many players in this story, and reconstructing the likeliest version of events---no mean feat with a circle, such as Shelley’s, that was rife with contention, backbiting and self-promotion.'
'One of the finest and most significant biographies of recent years.'
No reviews yet