Proserpine and Midas

Proserpine and Midas

The compositions published in Mrs. Shelleys lifetime afford but an inadequate conception of the intense sensibility and mental vigour of this extraordinary woman. Thus wrote Dr. Garnett, in 1862 (Preface to his Relics of Shelley). The words of praise may have sounded unexpectedly warm at that date. Perhaps the present volume will make the reader more willing to subscribe, or less inclined to demur. Mary Godwin in her younger days certainly possessed a fair share of that nimbleness of invention which generally characterizes women of letters. Her favourite pastime as a child, she herself testifies[1], had been to write stories. And a dearer pleasure had beento use her own characteristic abstract and elongated way of putting itthe following up trains of thought which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. All readers of Shelleys life remember how later on, as a girl of nineteenand a two years wifeshe was present, a devout but nearly silent listener, at the long symposia held by her husband and Byron in Switzerland (June 1816), and how the pondering over German horrors, and a common resolve to perpetrate ghost stories of their own, led her to imagine that most unwomanly of all feminine romances, Frankenstein. The paradoxical effort was paradoxically successful, and, as publishers lists aver to this day, Frankensteins monster has turned out to be the hardest-lived specimen of the raw-head-and-bloody-bones school of romantic tales. So much, no doubt, to the credit of Mary Shelley. But more creditable, surely, is the fact that she was not tempted, as Monk Lewis had been, to persevere in those lugubrious themes. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 6447
Author: Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Release Date: Sep 1, 2004
Format: eBook
Language: English