Customer Reviews (1)

A mortal passion
Mary Shelley's story has been suppressed for over a century, because it treats a taboo subject: incest.

When Mathilda is being courted by a young man her father becomes violently jealous. He can't control his overwhelming passion -'My daughter,I love you' - and flees.
From being her God, her father becomes Matilda's nightmare: 'infamy and guilt was mingled with my portion; unlawful and detestable passion has poured its poison into my ears and changed all my blood (in) a cold fountain of bitterness.'
The lovers are doomed for the attraction is stronger than life: 'I am in love with death; no maiden ever took more pleasure in the contemplation of her bridal attirement than I in fancying my limbs already enwrapped in their shroud: is it not my married dress? Alone it will unite me to my father when in an eternal union we shall never part.'

Although sometimes too sentimental, 'Matilda' is a strong psychological portrait, brilliantly written by an intelligentand very well read author: 'more lovely than a sunbeam, slighter, quicker than the waving plumage of a bird, dazzling as lightning and like it giving day to night,yet mild and faint, that smile came.'

The story treats an important human conflict, partly resolved by evolution (C. Lumsden, E.O.Wilson - Promethean Fire).

Highly recommended. ... Read more

Book Description

The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley reveal a remarkable woman living in a remarkable age. They date from October 1814--shortly after her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley--through September 1850, five months before her death. Her correspondents' names are familiar--Shelley himself, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, General Lafayette, Sir Walter Scott--and the letters abound with anecdotes about such eminent figures as her parents (William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft), Keats, Washington Irving, and Charles and Mary Lamb.

Publication of the widely acclaimed, three-volume edition of Mary Shelley's letters was completed in 1988, containing all 1,276 of her known extant letters. Now Betty T. Bennett has selected 230 of those letters to give an overview of Mary Shelley's life as she was seeing it, living it, and recording it. Bennett also includes an introductory essay that sketches a portrait of Mary Shelley, her world, and her place in the history of literature and letters.

Customer Reviews (1)

In Depth Study of a Classic Author
This book provides a fascinating look into the life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly.By reading actual letters written by Mary, to various important people in her life, you gain access to what her life outside the realm of literary circles was like.The author of this book adds interesting conjecture as to what the content of the letters means when clarity is needed or when certain facts aren't available.If you are interested in Mary's life & are looking for more than just a biography, "Selected Letters of" has much to offer.One star demerit for too little information from the time of her visit to Lord Byron at Lake Geneva in the Summer of 1816.Maybe there are fewer letters available from that time.But that's the time frame I am most interested in. ... Read more

Product Description
Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley; Mathilda and Proserpine and Midas ... Read more

Book Description
Mary Shelley's third published novel, The Last man, is a disillusioned vision of the end of civilization, set in the twenty-first century.The book offers a sweeping account of war, plague, love and desolation.It is the sort of apocalyptic vision that was widespread at the time, though Shelley's treatment of the theme goes beyond the conventional; it is extraordinarily interesting and deeply moving.

If The Last Man is in some sense a `conventional' text of the period, it is also intensely personal in its origin; Shelley refers in her journal to the last man as her alter ego, "the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me."The Novel thus develops out of and contributes to a network of story and idea in which fantasy, allusion, convention and autobiography are densely interwoven.

This new version of the first edition (1826) sets out to provide not only a thoroughly annotated text, but also contextual materials to help the reader acquire knowledge of the intellectual and literary milieu out of which the novel emerged.Appendices include material on `the last man' as early nineteenth-century hero, texts from the debate initiated by Malthus in 1798 about the adequacy of food supply to sustain human population, various accounts of outbreaks of plague, and Shelley's poems representing her feelings after the death of her husband.

The Last Man reverberates particularly strongly for the late twentieth-century reader, not only because of its millennial overtones but also because of its parallels between the plague that Shelley depicts and the AIDS epidemic of our own time. Overall, it is a novel that rival's Frankenstein in the rich profusion of ideas it gives rise to in the reader.Download Description
At another time we were haunted for several days by an apparition, to which our people gave the appellation of the Black Spectre. We never saw it except at evening, when his coal black steed, his mourning dress, and plume of black feathers, had a majestic and awe-striking appearance; his face, one said, who had seen it for a moment, was ashy pale; he had lingered far behind the rest of his troop, and suddenly at a turn in the road, saw the Black Spectre coming towards him. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Let His Death Crown His Life!
I am in ethereal love with Mary Shelley. Why is her literary importance and fancy not uplifted more than it is? I grimace whenever I go to a bookstore and glance each time at the Mary Shelley section to find only Frakenstein. She has other great books probably not many people know about. Such is the case in The Last Man. I thought Frankenstein was about as sad as one could allow a character to feel but after reading The Last Man Mary out does herself by really putting poor Verney in a pickle. This story really tugged at me hard and actually made me feel for the characters in a way so few books or movies ever have. If you know about Mary Shelley and have read Frankenstein or anything else by this, I feel, greatest author to have ever put word to paper, then you MUST read this beautiful accounting of "the last year of the world". It astonished me to find out that the book was out of print from 1833 to 1965. Wow! I failed to compare the story to such contemporary biological warfare or AIDS for that matter and took the story's meaning for what Shelley may have wanted to get across during her time that had neither. I believe she wants to almost persuade us of a deeper level of human condition and compassion by taking us as low as we can and then allowing us to constantly strive upward from that awful place she leaves Verney. Please, read more of Mary Shelley.

Mary Shelley Fantastic!
If you are a fan of the book Frankenstein, then you will
definetely enjoy this book.Mary Shelley is obviously
a gifted writer who is inciteful on human interplay.
The story is not so acurate when it describes the 21st
century, but that is not what the story concentrates on.
It is similar to Frankenstein about doomed characters
in a Greek tragedy.If your a fan of Mary then you must
buy this book.

Death and disease level all men
This novel is a combination of a `roman à clefs' and science fiction, with gothic and autobiographic elements.
In her vision of the end of the 21st century, Mary Shelley sees the Greek occupying Istanbul and England as a republic with three political parties (royalists, democrats and aristocrats). The leader of the democrats deserts his responsibilities through fear of the plague, while the intention of the head of the aristocrats (a highly idealized portrait of P.B. Shelley) is `to diminish the power of the aristocracy to effect a greater equalization of wealth and privilege and to introduce a perfect system of republican government.'
Byron (Lord Raymond) is not in the same league: `Power was the aim of all his endeavors. The selected passion was ambition.'

Her vision of mankind is pessimistic: `There was but one good and one evil in the world - life and death.'
For life, `The choice is with us; let us will it and our habitation becomes a paradise.'
But, `What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery? We are not formed for enjoyment; disappointment is the never-failing pilot of our life's bark, and ruthlessly carries us to the shoals.'
`It is a strange fact, but incontestable, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who disdains other argument than truth, has less influence over men's mind than he who refuses not to adopt any means, nor diffuse any falsehood for the advancement of his cause.'

Man doesn't control his destiny and the whole of mankind is wiped out by the plague. But, even on the verge of total destruction, false prophets preach intolerance with their `pernicious doctrines of election and special grace'.

This book is brilliantly written: `He was no longer bent to the ground, like an over-nursed flower of spring that, shooting up beyond its strength, is weighed down even by its own coronal of blossoms.'

It has a few minus points: slow progression, too idealized main characters and a rather too simplistic cause of the whole destruction of mankind.
But, it remains a real discovery and a very worth-while read, with an excellent introduction by Pamela Bickley.

Many novels have the plague as subject. I recommend highly `Bassompierre' by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

The Last Man by MaryShelley (1797-1851)
The book chronicles a great global plague which annihilates the
world except for one man who describes the world's demise.
The work was first published in 1826. It was out-of-print from
1833 through 1965 and has been widely read thereafter. Shelley's
"Last Man" has been resurrected due to the tremendous interest
in potential plagues like bird disease, global warming, continental earth movements, super hurricanes and out-of-control comets randomly threatening the earth of the future on a periodic basis.

Even Nostradamos talked about the world's end in the year 3797.
The volume is written in the English literature of the 1800s.
The language is superior. In spots, the vocabulary is of the
highest order. Here is a sample:

" She dwelt in a cottage whose trim grass-plat sloped down to
the waters of the lake of Ulswater; a beech wood stretched up the hill behind, and a purling brook gently falling from the
acclivity ran through poplar-shaded banks into the lake. "

Another unforgetable passage reminds us of Shelley's poetic
nature interwoven into the overall story. Details follow:

"The golden splendour arose, and weary nature awoke to suffer
yet another day of heat and thirsty decay. No flowers lifted up
their dew laden cups to meet the dawn; the dry grass had
withered on the plains; the burning fields of air were vacant of
birds; the cicale alone, children of the sun, began their shrill
and deafening song among the cypresses and olives. "

Just prior to the year 2100, Shelley paves the way for the
chaos in the making. A sample paragraph describes the
apprehension in the wind:

" This was not universal. Among better natures, anguish and
dread, the fear of eternal separation, and the awful wonder
produced by unprecedented calamity, drew closer to the ties of
kindred and friendship. Philosophers opposed their principles, as
barriers to the inundation of profligacy or despair , and
the only ramparts to protect the invaded territory of human
life; the religious, hoping now for their reward, clung fast
to their creeds, as the rafts and planks which over the tempest-
vexed sea of suffering, would bear them in safety to the harbour
of the Unknown Continent. "

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published a number of memorable
works around the time of "The Last Man". Her other works were:
- Perkin Warbeck in 1830--the author's fourth novel
- Lodore is published in 1835.
- Faulker is published in 1837

On February 1, 1851,Mary Shelley died.

"The Last Man," the best of Mary Shelley's "other" works
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley published "The Last Man" in 1826, eight years after her classic "Frankenstein" and four years after her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley died.Of all of her other novels, "The Last Man" is clearly the one that is of more than passing interest.In her Journal in May of 1824 Shelley wrote: "The last man!Yes, I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me."The result was one of the first novels to tell a story in which the human race is destroyed by pestilence, which we have seen in novels from Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" and Stephen King's "The Stand," and films such as the recent "28 Days Later..." However, "The Last Man" is also an early example of a dystopian novel set in the 21st century when England is a republic being governed by a ruling elite.Adrian, Earl of Windsor (and a representation of Shelley's late husband) introduces the narrator of the tale, Lionel Verney, who is the required outsider to describe and comment upon the world of the future.

Shelley's vision of the future is essentially a reaction against Romanticism and the failure of the movement to solve the problems of the world with art and imagination.This would stand in contrast to earlier English utopian works such as Francis Bacon's "The New Atlantis," which reflected the Age of Reason's belief that science would solve any and all problems.Shelley begins the story as a romance, with Lord Raymond (presumed to be modeled on Lord Byron) winning the hand of the lovely Perdita and being elected Protector.In contrast to the dire predictions of Thomas Malthus regarding unchecked population growth resulting in mass starvation, an ideal world seems to have been created.But then the plague breaks out in Constantinople and starts spreading.This plague is grounded more in fantasy than science, with Shelley clearly relying more on Boccaccio and Defoe, for her pandemic, which is not contagious (an interesting plot choice to be sure).

The point of the plague is that it allows Shelley to show the best and the worst of human nature.When the demagogue Ryland abdicates being Lord Protector, the altruistic Adrian takes his place and makes an appeal for brotherhood, even as anarchy runs rampant in the streets and eventually the main characters are forced to flee England, which has strong parallels to the expulsion from Eden.This sets up the idea at the end of the novel that the last survivors might be able to establish an earthly paradise and rebuild the human race after the plague has disappeared.I was rather surprised that Shelley kills off her female characters because I had expectations that this would be more of a feminist work.Of course, this is because I remember who her mother was, but "The Last Man" is clearly concerned more with her late husband.

"The Last Man" was probably Mary Shelley's least successful work during her lifetime, but today, which the interest in science fiction, as well as the real world threats of biological warfare and other weapons of mass destruction, this idea of how the world ends is quite pertinent.This is clearly her most important work after "Frankenstein," although obviously we are talking about a significant gap. ... Read more

Book Description
This collection contains all five of Mary Shelley's supernatural stories, and will hopefully shed much needed light on an author often credited with writing the first science fiction novel. Here you will find the secrets of eternal youth, souls that exchange bodies, and ancient Englishmen and Romans newly thawed out of ice.In addition to several stories by Mary Shelley, this volume also features a brand new story by renowned science fiction author Michael Bishop. This work serves as a narrative introduction for this collection.Mary Shelley's considerable reputation rests squarely on the shoulders of her one great novel - Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in 1818 and revised under her own byline in 1831. Her powerful tale of blasphemous creation is perhaps more familiar to modern readers through its many film adaptations as it is from the book itself. From Boris Karloff's electrifying performance as Frankenstein to Kenneth Branaugh's latest directorial rendering, the story has received numerous interpretations which have renewed interest in the book time and time again.However, Shelley's other works have not fared as well as Frankenstein. She wrote just a handful of novels, of which only The Last Man (1826) has remained sporadically in print, due to its great length and slow, ornate and often tedious use of language. A precursor to such disaster novels as George R. Stewart's Earth Abides and Richard Jeffries' After London, The Last Man follows its protagonist Lionel Verney through a distant future world which has been depopulated by plague.The shorter works of Mary Shelley have remained even more obscure. During her lifetime, she published just over two-dozen stories, only three of which were of interest to readers of science fiction and fantasy. In addition to these three supernaturally-themed stories, two additional stories were published after Shelley's death. "Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman," was printed in a volume of reminisces by a magazine editor who had commissioned the story thirty years earlier. "Valerius: The Reanimated Roman," a story in a similar vein to "Roger Dodsworth," remained unpublished until 1976, when both stories were discovered by Charles E. Robinson, a Shelley scholar and professor of English at the University of Delaware. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece.As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image … but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.Book Description

Customer Reviews (319)

I feel sorry...
for the people who hated this book and gave it poor reviews. Really missed out on what may be the greatest novel of all time. For me it's hard to put down. And the themes are deep and everlasting ones that humans will forever struggle with. Life and death, God vs science, good and evil, spiritual themes, and social ones also, all wrapped up in a GREAT story. Oh well, you can't expect everyone to get it and resonate with it.

One thing about this Rieger version: it says it "reproduces for the first time in more than a century the text of the first edition published in 1818". Not true. Donohue produced at least three editions (I have them) around 1895 that are all the 1818 text.
Just an FYI.

Believe the hype! This book is hard to surpass. I virtually never give 5 stars to ANYTHING. This deserves it.

Choose the 1818 version
Most editions of Mary Shelley's landmark book available today follow the heavily revised 1831 version. The impulse behind this trend is an honorable one (to present what is seemingly an author's "final revision"),but the 1818 version is preferable for many reasons. Looking back on her creation in later life, Shelley felt obliged to alter the book's focus in significant ways, adding what critic Marilyn Butler accurately describes as "long passages in which her main narrator, [Victor] Frankenstein, expresses religious remorse for making a creature..."The author sought to make the 1831 edition less controversial and thereby more palatable to the tastes of the reading public. The 1818 version is closer to Mary Shelley's original intentions, though it too, unfortunately, was filtered through the sensibilities of her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, who took many of his wife's rather straightforward passages and rendered them into his own more ornate and Ciceronian style. Still, the 1818 version remains more vital, more original, and less constrained by what the author believed would be acceptable to readers in 1830s England.

You've seen Karloff, now read the original
Once you read Shelley's classic you're going to scratch your head and wonder: Is this really the book that gave us the Karloff movie? Not to mention Herman Munster and Frankenberry. For over a century and half people have been cannibalizing this book for ideas, movies, other books, and products of every size, shape and type that our modern concept of Frankenstein holds little to no resemblence to the master work. While occasionally these bastardizations have had enjoyable results, like Young Frankenstein, it's criminal that so few people are unfamiliar with the source.Do yourself a favor and find out where it all came from.It's not nearly as creepy as you may think, but it's infinitely more thought provoking and it certainly doesn't hurt that this version is beautifully published at a very reasonable price.

Free SF Reader
It is pretty surprising that something come up with almost on a whim to
provide a diversion has come to be such an important text for two
genres, both horror and science fiction.

Victor Frankenstein's obsession with the creation of life ultimately ends in tragedy and death for those around him.

Frankenstein: The Good and the Bad
One reason why I don't like this book is because I don;t like scarcy books, but this is a very interesting book. I also think that it is totally cool that a woman wrote it because that proves that women can like spooky stories even if most don't. ... Read more

Book Description
Beset by jealousy over and admirer of his wife's, Lord Lodore has come with his daughter Ethel to the American wilderness; his wife Cornelia, meanwhile, has remained with her controlling mother in England.When he finally brings himself to attempt a return, Lodore is killed en route in a duel.Ethel does return to England, and the rest of the book tells the story of her marriage to the troubled and impoverished Villiers (whom she stands by through a variety of tribulations) and her long journey to a reconciliation with her mother.

Lodore's scope of character and of idea is matched by its narrative range and variety of setting; the novel's highly dramatic story-line moves at different points to Italy, to Illinois, and to Niagara Falls.And in this edition, which includes a wealth of documents from the period, the reader is provided with a sense of the full context out of which Shelley's achievement emerged.Download Description
It was, perhaps, strange that Fitzhenry, alive to the smallest evil that might approach his darling child, and devoted to her sole guardianship, should have been blind to the sort of danger which she ran during his absence. But the paternal protection is never entirely efficient. A father avenges an insult; but he has seldom watchfulness enough to prevent it. In the present instance, the extreme youth of Ethel might well serve as an excuse. She was scarcely fifteen; and, light-hearted and blithe, none but childish ideas had found place in her unruffled mind. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fabulous insite to Mary Shelley's life
I loved this book.Mystically it brought me a better understanding of Mary Shelley's life.Unfortunately I was forced to read it in a dusty room in the basement of Cambridge's library because no one has it in stock.The publisher MUST reprint this book because it is an absolute must for all Mary Shelley fans.Don't just stop at Frankenstein, there is so much more grotesque writing of Mary Shelley to experience. ... Read more

Book Description
A catalogue of printed books, manuscripts and autograph letters by Percy B. Shelley, Harriet Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, collected by Thomas J. Wise. ILLUS.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. ... Read more

Book Description

Includes 4 classics by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Indexed for easy navigation.