RADFORD – The Literary Career of Novelist Mary Shelley After 1822, published by The Edwin Mellen Press, has been released by Radford University Associate Professor of English, Erin Webster-Garrett.

Mary Shelley is best known for her first novel, the literary masterpiece Frankenstein (1818) which she wrote as the 18-year-old mistress-bride of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Less well-known and less talked about are Shelley's five other novels.  In fact, Frankenstein marked the beginning, not the end, of a career that spanned over 30 years and that bridged the Romantic and Victorian eras.

According to Webster-Garrett, "the traditional Mary Shelley story is that she was a one-book author who should be best remembered for passively mirroring the ideas of her radical parents and husband. My work develops the premise that Shelley’s career as an author began with the death of P. B. Shelley in 1822, and that her work after 1822 shows a conscious complication of the liberal philosophic tradition she both inherited and helped to refashion."

“Shelley was recovered for the same reasons so many other women writers were recovered, as a means of gaining insight and information about the more famous men in their lives, in this case Shelley's husband [P. B. Shelley] and father [William Godwin],” says Webster-Garrett.  “But after all these years, why is the  later part of her career, the part where she comes into her own as a struggling but nonetheless self-supporting writer, still so invisible?

“Shelley's real life story is much more compelling than the popular version we are routinely told, and her later novels are significant and important literary experiments because they suggest the artistic and intellectual evolution of one of the most prescient voices of British Romanticism.  For that reason I want people to know that Shelley was more, much more, than Frankenstein.”

Webster-Garrett teaches literary scholarship, composition, 18th and 19th century British literatures, and Women's Studies.  She has published articles in Cervantes, The Virginia Education Bulletin, and British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries, and has essays forthcoming in Clio, Keats-Shelley Journal, and Mama Ph.D. 

To order a copy of the book. e-mail sales@mellenpress.com or call the publisher at (716) 754-2788.