Muriel spark mary shelley biography novel

Mary Shelley

Muriel Spark

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In the summer of 1816, aged nineteen, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. A pioneering work of science fiction, it captured the popular imagination from the start. The daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley lived an unconventional life marred by tragedy. At sixteen she scandalised England by eloping with her married lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but was widowed after only a few years when he drowned. She survived him by nearly thirty years, supporting herself and their one surviving son largely by the pen.

Muriel Spark had a lifelong fascination with Mary Shelley. She published her first book on her in 1951, then spent decades revising and refining it. It is reissued here with previously unpublished material. Spark paints an engaging portrait of a complex and misunderstood figure. She divides her study into parts, ‘Biographical’ and ‘Critical’. A sympathetic account of Shelley’s life is followed by critical studies of her major literary works. Spark’s abridgement of Shelley’s uneven apocalyptic novel The Last Manis included here, while her initial scheme for the book and her later preface, in which she reflects on her own subsequent career as a novelist, are added. This is a fascinating study of Mary Shelley’s life and work. It also provides valuable insight into the critical and creative development of Muriel Spark.

With an introduction by Michael Schmidt.

Introduction by Michael Schmidt

Mary Shelley: Author’s Note

Preface

Textual Note

Part I. Biographical

Part II.

Painting a portrait of

In this engrossing biography,

Muriel Spark’s Mary Shelley: A Gothic and Liminal Life

Abstract

Muriel Spark’s first publication was a biographical and critical study of Mary Shelley. Published in 1951, entitled Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Shelley, it appeared at a time when many of Mary Shelley’s own publications were unavailable. Spark’s biography served significantly in bringing into the light an author who was known chiefly for being the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and for her novel Frankenstein. Arguably, even the novel was known only in a secondhand fashion to many, through James Whale’s film adaptations in the 1930s (particularly his Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein). Child of Light included an abridged version of Shelley’s The Last Man, as that novel was out of print at the time the biography was published, and had been out of print for some time. The significance of this biography is best attested to by the fact that, while it was published in Great Britain, it did not have an ‘official’ publisher in the United States. Despite this, a pirated edition found its way into print in North America, as Muriel Spark recounts in her preface to her revised edition (MS, p. x), retitled Mary Shelley: A Biography, which was published in 1987. Spark republished the biography, as she remarks, in large part because of the existence of the photocopied edition being sold in the USA. Taking into account much of the scholarship on Mary Shelley which had appeared in the three decades since the initial publication, Spark revised the work extensively, dropping the abridged version of The Last Man (MS, p. x).

It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.
Roland Barthes

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Notes

Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley: A biography, revised edition (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987).
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First published as child as

Traces the life of Mary Shelley,

Mary Shelley
August 8, 2021
I’ve recently read a short (Wikipedia!) summary of Percy Shelley’s life because in another book his drowning near Pisa was mentioned and I wanted to know how that happenned. Well, I was left stunned at his, shall we say, extreme behaviour, especially towards the women unlucky enough to be his partners in life… About Mary, I only knew superficially the story of how she wrote Frankenstein - now I became really interested to know more of her life and choices that kept a smart and enlightened woman within her times, with this… insufferable person.
Enter Muriel Sparks whose “Memento mori” I loved, and whose works include Mary’s biography (yay!)
From Muriel’s unpublished 1950. preface:
“Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had been an ardent feminist who, although she was at pains to set forth her theories on the rights of women, was herself temperamentally unsuited to the application of her doctrines. It was her daughter, Mary Shelley, who realised these ideals by a natural acceptance of her status as a creature the equal of, yet different from, the male of her time.”
So, what did I learn? That Mary was, like you and me, doing her best to get by in life with the cards she was dealt (and, of course, those she chose more or less wisely along the way - by far the most dramatic, her elopement with & attachment to Shelley). And the answer to the initial question? Love, of course…

The second part is critical analysis by Muriel of Mary’s main works - Frankenstein obviously, but also others. This was a bit too scholarly for me, especially about books I haven’t read (I only read Frankenstein, albeit a long time ago, and now abridged The Last Man which was included here; and I must say it’s not what I’d choose to read myself, not least due to writing style that can’t help but be outdated now), and I did in the end skim through most of it. What left an impression was when Mary writes about Shelley: the way she sees him and, in spite of living with h

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Painting a portrait of a gothic icon, this biography recounts Mary Shelley’s dramatic life, from her youth and turbulent marriage to her career as writer and editor. At the age of 20, Mary Shelley secured her place in history by writing Frankenstein, now acknowledged as one of the great literary classics. The daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley led an unconventional life, which is depicted—with previously unpublished show more material—in this remarkable biography that was originally released in 1987 as a thorough revision of Muriel Spark's 1951 book Child of Light. Spark lends her own talents as an accomplished writer and her sharp intelligence to this fascinating examination of Mary Shelley's life and writings.show less
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Muriel Spark wrote her biography of Mary Shelley before she published her first novel. Decades later she substantially revised the biography. Although she doesn't explicitly state this, I'm sure her experience as a novelist informed the revision, particularly the critical section of the book. I like reading novelists on other novelists because they have a different insight into the creative process than biographers who write only non-fiction.

I appreciated Spark's comment in the introduction that she “ha{s} always disliked the sort of biography which states 'X lay on the bed and watched the candle flickering on the roof beams,' when there is no evidence that X did so.” I also dislike that sort of biography, and when I read them I show more always end up questioning the facts as well as the added color. Spark comes across as a careful and conscientious biographer who does not speculate farther than is warranted by the historical evidence and, where her interpretation differs from Shelley's other biographers, acknowledges these differences of opinion.

I read this biography as a companion to Shelley's Frank

Muriel Spark's biography of Mary Shelley