A fictionalized account of Mary Shelley's life from a first person perspective, from her childhood to the publishing of her best known work in 1818. "Two centuries ago this year, the young woman who invented science fiction was only 20 when she wrote the book that became Frankenstein. Mary Shelley said, "People ask how I, then a young girl, could think of, and dilate upon, so hideous subject? Her father gave her a far better education than any woman of the age could hope for and made her the victim of ongoing incest. At 15, she became involved with one of the greatest poets in England and made love to him on her mother's grave. When she was 16, she escaped from home by running away for a six week walking tour of Europe and formed a ménage a trois with Shelley and her sister. Her immediate influences were two of the greatest poets of the age. Her lover, Percy Shelley, coached her to expand her understanding of writing. Her mentor, Lord Byron, challenged her to prove she was as good a writer as the best poet-philosophers of the Enlightenment. Both men admired her mind, and both wanted more. By the time she was 20, she published the book that changed the world." -Publisher's description

An ALA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA Quick Pick, and an ALA Recommended Book for Reluctant Young Readers Nancy and Katie are best friends with one big thing in common—they both cut themselves: “Not by accident, we do it purposely—and regularly—because physical pain is comforting, and because now it has become a habit.” Crosses was the first novel for young adults to deal with an increasingly widespread disorder, and “graphically describes the cry for help of many adolescents and how far they have to fall before they are even noticed” (Voice of Young Adults).

A major new anthology of Percy Bysshe Shelley's work, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy. 'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the leading English Romantics and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. His major works include the long visionary poems 'Prometheus Unbound' and 'Adonais', an elegy on the death of John Keats. His shorter, classic verses include 'To a Skylark', 'Mont Blanc' and 'Ode to the West Wind'. This important new edition collects his best poetry and prose, revealing how his writings weave together the political, personal, visionary and idealistic. This Penguin Classics edition includes a fascinating introduction, notes and other materials by leading Shelley scholars, Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.

We know the facts of Mary Shelley’s life in some detail—the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person—what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did—despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life.In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.

Winners of an Honorable Mention from the Modern Language Association's Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition Writing to his publisher in 1813, Shelley expressed the hope that two of his major works "should form one volume"; nearly two centuries later, the second volume of the Johns Hopkins edition of The Complete Poetry fulfills that wish for the first time. This volume collects two important pieces: Queen Mab and The Esdaile Notebook. Privately issued in 1813, Queen Mab was perhaps Shelley's most intellectually ambitious work, articulating his views of science, politics, history, religion, society, and individual human relations. Subtitled A Philosophical Poem: With Notes, it became his most influential—and pirated—poem during much of the nineteenth century, a favorite among reformers and radicals. The Esdaile Notebook, a cycle of fifty-eight early poems, exhibits an astonishing range of verse forms. Unpublished until 1964, this sequence is vital in understanding how the poet mastered his craft. As in the acclaimed first volume, these works have been critically edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. The poems are presented as Shelley intended, with textual variants included in footnotes. Following the poems are extensive discussions of the circumstances of their composition and the influences they reflect; their publication or circulation by other means; their reception at the time of publication and in the decades since; their re-publication, both authorized and unauthorized; and their place in Shelley's intellectual and aesthetic development.