The historical Mary Shelley is still here (1797-1851), along with all the remarkable incidents and associations, including her relationship with Percy Shelley, her friendship with Lord Byron and her creation of that most famous gothic tale 200 years ago. But the ground on which she stands, the very apartments in which she lived, are freshly illuminated, newly imagined, helping us draw closer to this fascinating but elusive writer ... this is not simply a biography; it is, as the title tells us, a record of Sampson’s search for Shelley—a point she reminds us of by using questions like bread crumbs, steering us along the path of discovery ... if there is a lesson here, it is that the biographer must rely on both. It is not enough to supply us with a historical figure’s street address, the biographer must re-create the street, the house and the rooms of that house so that we can encounter a living being.
How she came to write such a masterpiece is the question at the heart of Fiona Sampson’s sensitive, probing biography. One answer is that she was deeply serious and highly intelligent ... Another answer Sampson gives to the question of how Mary came to write Frankenstein is because she was a woman. She knew, as no man can, what it means to bring forth new life and to be responsible for its physical make-up, as Dr Frankenstein is for his 'creature' ... If we get another literary biography in 2018 as astute and feelingful as this one, we shall be lucky.
Mary’s life is recounted with insight and empathy by Fiona Sampson’s In Search of Mary Shelley, the most engaging of a clutch of books published to mark the novel’s bicentenary.
Is it possible to trace the 'weird nativity' of Shelley’s celebrated novel Frankenstein, which she would begin writing only 18 years later ... The poet Fiona Sampson believes that it is ... there is no doubting the impact of Wollstonecraft’s death on her life. It runs like a thread through everything she does, and everything she is, and while Sampson’s sense of this may sometimes be a touch 20th century – her recourse to what 'the psychologists' have to say can be wearing – it is also the chief virtue of her daringly swift and enjoyably irreverent retelling of Shelley’s life. At the heart of her biography lies a paradox, which is that its engine is powered by absence and loss. Even when the action is at its most frantic, Sampson never loses sight of the gaping void below.
Anyone who is looking for a balanced account of Mary Shelley’s troubled life should begin with Ms. [Anne K.] Mellor or Ms. [Miranda] Seymour. If you are after bravura scene-setting, however, and an ardent inhabiting of the book’s subject, Ms. Sampson can’t be bettered ... Little of what she says is new, but the way in which it is presented is hair-raisingly immediate ... Ms. Sampson is scathing about the hypochondriac, self-centered yet undeniably charismatic Percy, deftly anatomizing the predicament in which Mary found herself ... Ms. Sampson argues that Mary never understood 'that her youthful decision to run away with Percy could be misread as self-indulgence rather than passionately held moral and political principle,' but this contention is belied by the guilty sympathy she would express for 'poor Harriet, to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows as the atonement claimed by fate for her death.'
Sampson has written a fascinating book. She gives a sound explanation of the publishing history and reception of Frankenstein and reminds us that Mary was the author of several novels, alongside her children’s stories and travel writing. However, none of her later works matches up to Frankenstein, so the biography inevitably becomes less interesting in its later pages. One cavil is that more could have been said about why and how Frankenstein is so extraordinary ... That the author was a teenage girl upstaging Byron and Shelley with the force of her imagination never ceases to amaze. Mary Shelley changed the face of fiction.
Sampson’s approach in In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein is the opposite of that taken by Muriel Spark in Child of Light (1951) ... Sampson treats Mary’s writing more as a series of clues—palimpsests through which it is possible to trace biography ... She concentrates on girlhood and youth, passing swiftly over the long years of widowhood ... Sampson’s book succeeds intermittently in bringing Mary closer to us ... But descriptions of her prose (the rhythm of one letter is described as being 'like driving a car with the breaks on') can be distracting and anachronistic. Ultimately, Mary Shelley emerges from Sampson’s book as an intellectual interested in moral codes or laws: a daughter of whom Wollstonecraft would have been deeply proud.
In the face of...archival dearth, Sampson nevertheless builds a personality, piecing together what it must have been like to grow up and live as Mary Shelley, until we can 'see the actual texture of her existence'. In places, Sampson is as adept as Frankenstein himself, giving life to a figure who convincingly aches and bleeds ... The landscapes and interiors within which Sampson’s subject moves are as crisply rendered as Frankenstein’s own plane of Arctic ice ... Sampson tries to rescue her from...patriarchal determinism by structuring her biography as a series of choppy freeze frames’, static painterly tableaux in Mary’s life around which she traces the run-up and fall-out ... But this methodology – this sifting of a life according to moments that posterity has deemed consequential – sits awkwardly at odds with Sampson’s self-stated biographer’s duty to 'hugely enlarge' Mary and try to comprehend her ... In 1835, Mary reflected on how 'the true end of biography' was to deduce 'the peculiar character of the man' from the 'minute, yet characteristic details' that punctuated the life: from the specifics of place and clothing and bodily experience in which Sampson’s biography excels.
As previous biographers have, she sees Mary’s turbulent life in the context of the Romantic Movement, and as part of an early wave of feminism that ended in the conservative Victorian era and its careful presentation of domestic contentment. In places, her book reads more like social history than biography. At almost every dramatic moment, Sampson digresses, filling in the picture with background information, some of it fascinating, some annoying ... Sampson’s book does little to alter our conception of her as a passionate radical ... 'She changed the face of fiction,' Sampson observes ... An argument can be made for that — and, indeed, for the publication of yet another biography of this extraordinary woman.
...an incisive and emotionally resonant portrait of Mary Shelley ... Because so much of Shelley’s early correspondence was lost, Sampson often relies on conjecture to get inside her subject’s mind and feelings. This approach may not be to everyone’s taste, but it creates an almost cinematic picture of long-ago events and succeeds in bringing an unconventional woman to vivid life.
Throughout, Sampson demonstrates why the story of Shelley and Frankenstein remains so intriguing, even today. The author deftly plumbs the depths of Mary’s psyche to enlighten us about both Shelleys and reveal the profound effects they had on each other.
