Mary Shelley Studies: From “Author of Frankenstein” to “the Great Work of Life”

Abstract

This essay traces developments in Mary Shelley studies, which arose in the late 1960s after a period of critical neglect. It looks backward to Victorian conceptions as they were promoted by her heirs to account for a view of Shelley as intellectually timid, a tendency to approach her writings through biographical perspectives, a conviction that her writings diminish in quality after Frankenstein. If interest in Frankenstein dating from the late 1960s served as a catalyst for study of her literary output, a proliferation of work on Shelley has been influenced by the much more recent appearance of scholarly and paperback editions of her writings. Critical trends in criticism of her fictions, biographical writings, travel literature, and editing are briefly surveyed, and the essay concludes with some tentative suggestions about possible directions. Above all, there is a need to continue to look beyond Frankenstein and to view Shelley’s self-described “great work of life” from a more comprehensive perspective in which she is writing not merely as the wife of Percy Shelley or as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, but in her own right.