Shelley and His Readers


Book Description




Almost Invincible


Book Description

"Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in a thunderstorm in 1814, when she was eighteen. By then, she had living for two years in a scandalous relationship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was married with children. The novel was conceived in a contest with him and Lord Byron to tell ghost stories"--Cover.




The New Southern Gentleman


Book Description

"Daniel Randolph Deal is a Southern aristocrat, having the required bloodline, but little of the nobility. A man resistant to the folly of ethics, he prefers a selective, self-indulgent morality. He is a confessed hedonist, albeit responsibly so."--Back cover




In Search of Mary Shelley


Book Description

We know the facts of Mary Shelley’s life in some detail—the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person—what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did—despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life.In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.




Whispers in the Reading Room


Book Description

Lydia’s job at the library is her world—she never expected to be a suspect to a murder. And now she must rely on the one man she’s not sure she can trust. Just months after the closure of the Chicago World’s Fair, librarian Lydia Bancroft finds herself fascinated by a mysterious dark-haired and dark-eyed patron. He has never given her his name; he actually never speaks to a single person. All she knows about him is that he loves books as much as she does. Only when he rescues her in the lobby of the Hartman Hotel does she discover that his name is Sebastian Marks. She also discovers that he lives at the top of the prestigious hotel and that most everyone in Chicago is intrigued by him. Lydia and Sebastian form a fragile friendship, but when she discovers that Mr. Marks isn’t merely a very wealthy gentleman, but also the proprietor of an infamous saloon and gambling club, she is shocked. Lydia insists on visiting the club one fateful night and suddenly is a suspect to a murder. She must determine who she can trust, who is innocent, and if Sebastian Marks—the man so many people fear—is actually everything her heart believes him to be. “Shelley Gray writes a well-paced story full of historical detail that will invite you into the romance, the glamour . . . and the mystery surrounding the Chicago World’s Fair.” —Colleen Coble, USA Today bestselling author of Rosemary Cottage and the Hope Beach series The Chicago World Fair Mystery series Book 1—Secrets of Sloane House Book 2—Deception on Sable Hill Book 3—Whispers in the Reading Room Book length: 86,000 words Includes discussion questions for book clubs




The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844: 1822-1844


Book Description

The Past Masters Journals of Mary Shelley database contains Shelley's journals 1814-1844 as published in the definitive Oxford University Press edition, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diane Scott-Kilvert.




Kate Shelley and the Midnight Express


Book Description

Kate stared at the rickety wooden bridge. There were boards loose on its narrow walkway. There was no railing to hold on to. She was afraid to cross this bridge even in daylight. But she had to cross it now. She had to get to the train station in time to stop the midnight express. When a heavy storm destroyed the bridge over Honey Creek, near Kate Shelley's home in Moingona, Iowa, fifteen-year-old Kate bravely rushed out into the storm, saving the lives of two men and preventing hundreds of other lives from being lost. This is the true story of a young girl's resourcefulness and courage in the face of great danger.




Red Shelley


Book Description




Byron's Women


Book Description

One was the mother who bore him; three were women who adored him; one was the sister he slept with; one was his abused and sodomized wife; one was his legitimate daughter; one was the fruit of his incest; another was his friend Shelley's wife, who avoided his bed and invented science fiction instead. Nine women; one poet named George Gordon, Lord Byron – mad, bad and very very dangerous to know. The most flamboyant of the Romantics, he wrote literary bestsellers, he was a satirist of genius, he embodied the Romantic love of liberty (the Greeks revere him as a national hero), he was the prototype of the modern celebrity – and he treated women (and these women in particular) abominably. In BYRON'S WOMEN, Alex Larman tells their extraordinary, moving and often shocking stories. In so doing, he creates a scurrilous 'anti-biography' of one of England's greatest poets, whose life he views – to deeply unflattering effect – through the prism of the nine damaged woman's lives.




Percy Bysshe Shelley


Book Description

Today, Percy Bysshe Shelley is an emblem of the Romantic movement and one of the lights of English culture--his poems memorized by schoolchildren, his life honored with a memorial in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. That wasn't always the case, however. In his own day, Shelley was widely loathed, seen as an immoral atheist and a traitor to his class for his revolutionary politics. His work was damned as well, receiving scathing reviews rooted as much in disapproval of his politics and personal life as in the verse itself. That's the Shelley that Jacqueline Mulhallen brings to life in this accessible, political biography: the Shelley who, though writing when the working class was in its infancy, clearly grasped--and wanted to change--the system of oppression under which laborers and women lived. The revolutionary Shelley, Mulhallen shows, has long served as an inspiration to figures from Karl Marx to W. B. Yeats to the poets and writers of today, and for popular movements like the Chartists and the suffragettes, even as his public image and poetry became part of the establishment. An engaging look at one of English history and literature's most compelling, complicated, and talented figures, Percy Bysshe Shelley will be a valuable contribution to our understanding of the man and his work.