Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives

Susan McKnight is an administrator of the Courts Technology Integrated Justice Project at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Mary Wollstonecraft longed for a daughter but died giving birth to Mary
(Shelley), who spent her life longing for the mother she had lost. This
collection of essays by prominent Canadian, American, and Australian
writers examines the intersecting lives and texts of these two women who
never met in life.

The Romantic era was a time of introspection, and the writings of
Wollstonecraft and Shelley assumed many forms: travel writing,
autobiography, novels, and poetry. The essays cover all critical
approaches to the works: political relevance, structural importance,
psychoanalysis, historic identity, and deconstructionism. Individual
topics include feminist revisionism, textual scholarship, the validity
of creative work as allegorical autobiography, and explanations of the
use of the first-person pronoun.

The collection includes an original play by Rose Scollard called Caves
of Fancy. The main characters are Mary Shelley, her half-sister Fanny,
and her stepsister Claire. The “protagonist” is a creature who takes
on the identities of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
Lord Byron, and various other figures important to the recollections of
the three girls. The creature also acts as the chorus, the critic, and
comic relief. The play incorporates many of the topics discussed in the
essays.

Readers familiar with both the period and the writings of these women
have the most to gain from this interesting collection.