THE LITERARY CAREER OF NOVELIST MARY SHELLEY AFTER 1822

Description

This book focuses on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelleys literary career after 1822, and Dr. Webster-Garrett explores the neglected end of the Mary Shelley Story and questions inherited images of her as a bourgeois satellite of masculine genius and as a child prodigy whose genius faded after The Last Man . The study contextualizes Shelleys later career in terms of the rise of discourses of influence to describe sociopolitical, cultural, spiritual, and sexual relationships, and in terms of the rise of Romantic cultural anxieties regarding the ascendance of the popular novel and romance to positions of cultural influence. Shelleys late novels each showcase a female principal who exerts a fully conscious and fully cognizant force on her textual world. In 1830, this deviation gained more significance as Shelley, for the first time, created a narrative in which a beautiful woman, Katherine Gordon, survives a masculine narrative in order to tell her own alternative tale. Her post-1830 novels trace the ultimate subversive act for a woman in the nineteenth-century: continued existence. As such, they demonstrate a dramatic reversal of Shelleys approach to romantic prose fiction and suggest her need to separate herself from romance as a masculinist tradition that compulsively celebrates the death of a beautiful woman.