![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's axiomatic that genius is often characterized by questionable social skills and/or behavior, and it would appear to hold true in the case of Mary Shelley's circle of family and friends. The Hooblers present unflinching portraits of Mary, her husband Percy, father William Godwin and friend, Lord Byron among others. Mary receives the kindest treatment next to her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) Both Marys suffer at the hands of the men in their lives, and Mary the younger spends a good deal of time trying to make some sense of that suffering. But the men... they are true pieces of work. They are all selfish, self-centered, arrogant and cruel even in their affections. They seem to have little use for the women in their lives, less for the children they father promiscuously. They live for their "art" and the pleasures it buys them. And in spite of that art, they are not particularly attractive when viewed through this lens. Of the three most prominent women in the book, Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, is the least talented and the most unpalatable thanks mostly to her single-minded pursuit of Lord Byron and her possible romantic involvement with her sister's husband, Percy Shelley.
I picked up the book originally because I have long been fascinated by the events of that "haunted summer" of 1816 when Byron challenged his friends to write a ghost story. The Hooblers present those events as a kind of centerpiece to the larger story of Mary Shelley, beginning with a short but careful examination of her mother's life with an eye to how it affected Mary's life and writing. One is tempted to wonder how Wollstonecraft might have viewed her daughter's elopement with Percy Shelley, and her writing career. As it is her death, not even a fortnight after the birth of her younger daughter, was the first of many losses that informed Mary Shelley's work. And in less than a quarter century, the younger Mary would lose three children, a half-sister, her husband and the love -- such as it was -- of her own father because of her relationship with Shelley. She would be haunted by the suicide of Shelley's first wife, Harriet, and her husband's chronic infidelities, possibly even with Claire. It's no wonder that she produced one of the most memorable horror novels ever penned.
I picked up the book originally because I have long been fascinated by the events of that "haunted summer" of 1816 when Byron challenged his friends to write a ghost story. The Hooblers present those events as a kind of centerpiece to the larger story of Mary Shelley, beginning with a short but careful examination of her mother's life with an eye to how it affected Mary's life and writing. One is tempted to wonder how Wollstonecraft might have viewed her daughter's elopement with Percy Shelley, and her writing career. As it is her death, not even a fortnight after the birth of her younger daughter, was the first of many losses that informed Mary Shelley's work. And in less than a quarter century, the younger Mary would lose three children, a half-sister, her husband and the love -- such as it was -- of her own father because of her relationship with Shelley. She would be haunted by the suicide of Shelley's first wife, Harriet, and her husband's chronic infidelities, possibly even with Claire. It's no wonder that she produced one of the most memorable horror novels ever penned.
