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The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
Random House
May 2015
On Sale: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 0812980476 EAN: 9780812980479 Kindle: B00N6PEOVC Paperback / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE
BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SEATTLE TIMES This groundbreaking dual biography brings to life a
pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew.
Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the
subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever
examined their lives in one book—until now. In Romantic
Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon reunites the trailblazing author
who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the
Romantic visionary who gave the world Frankenstein—two
courageous women who should have shared their lives, but
instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy.
In 1797, less than two weeks after giving birth to her
second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft died, and a remarkable
life spent pushing against the boundaries of society’s
expectations for women came to an end. But another was just
beginning. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary was to follow a
similarly audacious path. Both women had passionate
relationships with several men, bore children out of
wedlock, and chose to live in exile outside their native
country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices
women faced and wrote books that changed literary history.
The private lives of both Marys were nothing less than the
stuff of great Romantic drama, providing fabulous material
for Charlotte Gordon, an accomplished historian and a gifted
storyteller. Taking readers on a vivid journey across
revolutionary France and Victorian England, she seamlessly
interweaves the lives of her two protagonists in alternating
chapters, creating a book that reads like a richly textured
historical novel. Gordon also paints unforgettable portraits
of the men in their lives, including the mercurial genius
Percy Shelley, the unbridled libertine Lord Byron, and the
brilliant radical William Godwin.
“Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every
rule there was to break,” Gordon writes of Wollstonecraft
and Shelley. A truly revelatory biography, Romantic Outlaws
reveals the defiant, creative lives of this daring
mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid
conventions of their era.
No awards found for this book.
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