Mary Shelley’s letters

Abstract

To date, some 1,307 of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's letters have been published, spanning the years from September 1814 until shortly before her death on February 1, 1851. The letters are wide-ranging in subject - family, friends, politics, travel, literature, culture, publishing, finances, and issues of daily life - as would be expected of a cosmopolitan figure in a world in which letters provided a major means of communication. So, too, do Mary Shelley's correspondents vary, ranging from the remarkable Godwin-Shelley inner circle through friends and acquaintances, among whom were many eminent figures who influenced the history of the era, to strangers attracted to her family by their prominence. But for Mary Shelley, the letter genre took on a purpose beyond the exchange of information. She, along with the other English Romantics, interpreted the political ideology of individual rights into a metaphoric literary ideology: so, too, whatever their differences, the Romantics depicted the world around them based on their perceptions of, and responses to, an era of political, scientific, and social revolution. As a result, through their choice of themes, diction, structure, and point of view, they matched their advocacy of political and social reform with an assault on what they viewed as entrenched literary conventions. Not surprisingly, Mary Shelley disrupted a number of conventions in her works, not the least making politics and power a central focus for a woman's writing. Stylistically, she redefined the notion of “mixed genres” from an amalgam of verse and prose to a prose style infused by lengthy poetic reflections, for which she was variously praised and faulted. And in ways different from any other English Romantic author, Mary Shelley used the letter genre not only to bridge public and private concerns, but to link them in bold, original ways in her fiction, travelogues, memoirs, and editions.