The Literary Career of Novelist Mary Shelley After 1822: Romance, Realism, and the Politics of Gender

This book explores the neglected end of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley�� literary career, questioning inherited images of her as a bourgeois satellite of masculine genius and as a child-prodigy whose genius faded after The Last Man. The study contextualizes Shelley�� post-1822 career in terms of the rise of discourses of influence to describe sociopolitical, cultural, spiritual, and sexual relationships, and in terms of the rise of Romantic cultural anxieties regarding the ascendance of the popular novel and romance to positions of cultural influence.