Name: Frankenstein and the Critics
Price: 214.83 RON
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Author: Mary Shelley
ISBN: 9781329820258

Frankenstein and the Critics

Mary Shelley

Walter Scott

Percy Bysshe Shelley

With like many great works of art, 'Frankenstein' was initially misunderstood. The first reviews were decidedly mixed. An anonymous review in The Literary Panorama and National Register published June 1 1818 dismissed Shelley's work as 'a feeble imitation of one that was very popular in its day.' Other periodicals were kinder. Writing in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine on 20 March 1818, Walter Scott praised the unusual Gothic Romance as a "tale, though wild in incident, is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that mixture of hyperbolical Germanisms with which tales of wonder are usually told." 'Frankenstein and the Critics' presents a selection of the most prominent reviews from the time of Frankenstein's publication. Also included is Mary Shelley's uncensored 1818 text often labeled 'Frankenstein 1818' presented in its unabridged entirety. This is the original, 1818 text. In 1831, the more traditionally first "popular" edition in one volume appeared.

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MARY SHELLEY (1797-1851) experienced the kind of childhood that sounds like a dark fairy tale. Her mother, an early feminist, died giving birth to her; she was brought up by a remote father (the philosopher William Godwin) and a stepmother who hated her. Her step-sister was a depressive, who would later commit suicide; and there were also a step-brother and a half-brother in the family. The young Mary escaped from her surroundings into reading, and would often read by the side of her mother's tomb.In 1813, she met Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was only twenty-one years old, but was already married-and unhappy in his marriage. And it was already clear that he was destined to be one of the geniuses of English poetry. Despite Mary's age, the two fell in love and eloped in 1816. Because of this, her father disowned her.The young couple decided to live abroad, and settled in Italy. It was Byron who suggested, in 1817, that they each write a horror story of some kind. The result, in Mary's case, was Frankenstein. A young girl of twenty wrote the book whose name has become synonymous with horror.Tragedy followed them: of their four children, only one lived very long. Then in 1822, aged just thirty, Percy Shelley was drowned.Mary's life was effectively over: even though she lived for another thirty years, her flame never again burned as brightly as it had in the company of her brilliant husband and their friends such as the poet Lord Byron; and although she wrote more, the single book which is her lasting legacy belonged to the time in Italy.