Mary Shelley’s Early Novels

‘This Child of Imagination and Misery’

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Mary Shelley’s Early Novels seeks to redress the commonly held view that Mary Shelley was simply another mouthpiece for her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her most challenging and ambitious novels; Frankenstein, Valperga, and The Last Man, are examined in the light of her intellectual relationship with Percy Shelley. We see the way in which these novels reflect her gradual rejection of his radical tenets in an assertion of her own intellectual and ideological independence.