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Helen M. Buss, D. L. MacDonald, and Ann McWhir, eds. Mary Wolf stonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives. Windsor, ONT: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2001. 340 pp. ISBN 0-8892-0363-6, $49.95.
Given the importance of both these writers and their relation to one another, we might reasonably expect a body of work to have grown up that discussed their lives and works as intertwined. There are, however, relatively few studies that address this mother and daughter together, largely because of the untimely death of Mary Wollstonecraft just days after Mary Shelley's birth. Severed from one another in life, the two have suffered a similar fate in terms of their critical reception. As Charles E. Robinson notes in his contribution to this volume, "there is a book begging to be written... a study of the ways in which Mary Wollstonecraft and her literary texts play out in the lights and shadows of Mary Shelley's life and works" (128).
This collection maps out the terrain that such a book might cover. It resulted from a 1997 conference at the University of Calgary commemorating the bicentennial of Shelley's birth and Wollstonecraft's death, and the editors aimed to produce a text that would be collaborative and "integrated by diverse creative and scholarly energies" (8). In an unusual choice reflective of their commitment to multiple perspectives and voices, the editors include Caves of Fancy, a new original play based upon the writings of Wollstonecraft and Shelley by Canadian author Rose Scollard, which was performed at the 1997 event. Because the theme for the conference was "writing lives," the collected essays spend as much time theorizing the activity and definitions of life writing as they do analyzing particular texts, an aspect of the collection that widens its potential audience. Most of the scholars represented have written extensively on the period in which Wollstonecraft and Shelley were writing, and many are established leaders in the field. Cross-references to one another's work pervade the collection, giving the reader a sense of the liveliness of the conference that brought this group together. The selections are fairly brief, averaging about fourteen pages, with a total of sixteen contributors represented. In general, the book is refreshingly multivalent, and relatively free from excess baggage.
The figure of Shelley's Frankenstein...