In this book, the author offers an extensively expanded version of the introduction she wrote for Pickering and Chatto's eight volume set, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. Along with her retelling of Mary Shelley's eventful life story, the author gives us a fresh reading of Frankenstein in the context of its author's full career. She also discusses a variety of Mary Shelley's lesser known works, including Matilda, Valperga, The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck, Lodore, Falkner, and her travel books. The result is a compelling portrait of Mary Shelley as she saw herself--an inventive, irreverent writer whose desire for political and social reform was at the heart of her literary expression for three decades.

"This collection of essays offers a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley, emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. Mary Shelley in Her Times brings fresh insight to the life and work of an often neglected or misunderstood writer who, the editors remind us, spent nearly three decades at the center of England's literary world during the country's profound transition between the Romantic and Victorian eras."--Jacket.

"Through years of investigation, Bennett uncovered the improbable truth: David Lyndsay and Walter Sholto Douglas were the same person and, despite historical and legal evidence to the contrary, that person was a woman--Mary Diana Dods, illegitimate daughter of a Scottish aristocrat. Now, nearly two centuries later, her story is revealed as a tale of imagination and defiance, with a sly grin at posterity."--Amazon.com viewed August 17, 2020