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"The date is 30th August, 1797. In a large, modern house, in an area that is now Kings Cross but was then London's almost-rural outskirts, a family is gathered. A father, a mother, and their newborn baby. The birth has been easy; the baby is well. At this moment, everything is perfect. This was how Mary Shelley entered the world, this calm moment the start of an astonishing, adventurous life. Within days, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, would be dead, and Mary would be brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged seventeen, she eloped with Percy Shelley, embarking on years of peripatetic travel across Europe. And two years later, the first stirrings of the story that would become Frankenstein would come to her, as she waited out a rainy summer by the shores of Lake Geneva. In In Search of Mary Shelley, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Far more than simply the author of a single, monumentally famous novel, she uncovers a prolific writer, a deep thinker, a woman who dared to challenge convention and who thought and felt with uncommon passion. Published for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this is a major new work of biography by a prize-winning writer and poet."--
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