Religion Around Mary Shelley by Jennifer L. Airey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religion Around Mary Shelley by Jennifer L. Airey Staci Stone RELIGION AROUND MARY SHELLEY, by Jennifer L. Airey. Religion Around. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 231 pp. $79.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Readers interested in an overview of Mary Shelley’s works through the lens of religion and belief will find Jennifer L. Airey’s Religion Around Mary Shelley useful for its accurate biographical summary and thorough analysis of Shelley’s works, including those published after the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Airey’s monograph, which treats Mary Shelley’s “shifting depictions of religion across the length of her career” in order “to foreground Mary Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period,” is a welcome addition to Shelley scholarship (p. 2). Airey’s expertise in British religious history and gender provides a valuable perspective on Shelley’s works, as Airey achieves her goal of examining both the historical moment “and the ways in which [Shelley’s] works reflect and engage with the religious controversies of her day” (p. 3). [End Page 354] The titles of Airey’s main chapters focusing on Shelley’s works—“Doubt,” “Despair,” and “Domesticity”—simultaneously gesture toward stages of Shelley’s life, her psychological state, and religious faith. Interestingly, Airey subtitles her conclusion “On Ghosts” yet does not discuss the short Shelley essay of the same title, which refers to the “spirits” Shelley mourns in her later travel writings. Airey’s knowledgeable summary of religious movements and thought from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries provides an expansive backdrop for Shelley’s own beliefs, which, as Airey points out, were informed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Rational Dissent, William Godwin’s Calvinism, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s atheism, and her reading of Humphry Davy, William Lawrence, John Milton, Constantine François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, and others. Ultimately, Airey provides convincing evidence to support her main claim that Shelley’s works reveal her movement “from doubt to despair to domestic contentment” as she increasingly embraced “the feminine religious heritage of her mother over the doubts of her father and husband” (p. 66). This book, then, participates in bridging Shelley-as-wife and Shelley-as-daughter scholarship, as categorized by Charlotte Sussman in her article “Daughter of the Revolution: Mary Shelley in Our Times” (2004). As one would expect from a book on Shelley and religion, examples from Frankenstein (1818) abound—from discussion of John Milton’s Satan and the way Shelley rewrites his Paradise Lost (1667) to organized religion’s treatment of women. Airey also deftly uses examples from Shelley’s “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman” (1819) and Mathilda (1819–1820), offering the main characters as versions of Frankenstein’s creature. Airey argues that these early works illustrate that Shelley had taken up the theme of religion in the 1810s when she was struggling with doubt and atheism. However, Airey also points to the ways that Shelley observes the power and potential of writing, and her later works, such as Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826), are a celebration of human creativity and capability. By including “The Convent of Chaillot” (1828) as an example to support her argument—referencing the story in four separate places, noting only at the last mention that Shelley’s authorship is in question—Airey has taken up the challenge presented by Charles E. Robinson in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories (1976) and Nora Crook in “Sleuthing towards a Mary Shelley Canon” (2006) that scholars provide additional support for attributing this work to Shelley. Airey weaves a peripheral argument about Shelley’s authorship of this tale, as she uses details from other Shelley works to bolster the same points supported by “The Convent of Chaillot.” Airey jumps from the theme of “human happiness in a world without divine love” evident in Shelley’s mid-career stories and novels to Evangelicalism, arguing that “Shelley’s later works are not explicitly [End Page 355] religious, yet in them she adopts an argument common to many Evangelical texts” (pp. 68, 128). While Mary Poovey, in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley...