Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (review)

360 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 2:4 Wollstonecraft and other late eighteenth-century women into a "quartet" which is then attacked by male writers. My impression is that Astell, whose politics differed so very widely from Wollstonecraft's, was not a living force by the time her descendants came to write. The two women are cleverly brought together in their use of metaphors, but surely there is no echo when Astell hoped for an education which would allow women to "see through" what ensnares them and when Wollstonecraft saw women sadly as creatures who "see through" a gross medium and take things on trust. It is unclear why Duff, and not Polwhele, should have had to modify his language about women after the American Declaration of Independence, the fall of the Bastille, and The Rights of Woman, since both were writing after these events. Nor is it clear why these events were chosen as crucial. Although the book quotes liberally from the women writers of the time, it seems to me that the choice of quotation on the whole makes the radicals less radical and the conservatives less conservative; both quotations and comments do less than justice to the complex and changing position of Hannah More, who has become something of a whipping-woman for modern feminists. By the end of the book I found that the creation of a radical Jane Austen had required a search in her novels for opinions that conformed to some of those held by accepted radicals of the time and to those we hold now, and an approval of these opinions even if they are mouthed by such disapproved characters as Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In the chapter that weaves Jane Austen's life into her art, Sulloway paints a bleak picture of constraints and poverty and suggests that Austen received a psychic blow that contributed to her early death. The constraints and relative poverty are undeniable and are very movingly described in the book, but it seems to me that Sulloway downplays the importance of the novels as a source of finance and of some fame. In the context of Austen's paltry annual allowance, the sums earned—and which she could presumably have gone on earning—from fiction were not negligible. Many of Sulloway's most daring claims are in the preface and early sections; thereafter the book settles down into a routine contextualizing of the novels and a delighted quoting of the Austen wit. It is not the worse for that and, although Sulloway does not convince me of the radicalism of Austen, she does convince me of another quality she finds in the books, "infectious joy," a quality which at her best she herself conveys to the Austen reader. Janet Todd University of East Anglia Emily W. Sunstein. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1989. xi + 478pp. US$24.95; CAN$34.95. Mary Shelley's reputation has been shaped by idolaters and iconoclasts, many of whom had a personal stake in their version of her story. At one extreme is Mary Shelley's daughter-in-law, who needed to make her life acceptable to the Victorians, and who published a carefully censored version of her journals and letters, literally cutting out offensive passages. At the other, Edward John Trelawny wanted desperately to convert his brief acquaintance with Percy Shelley into a glorious friendship on which his own fame would rest; doing so meant denying Mary Shelley's importance. At both extremes, and in the many interpretations in between, Mary Shelley is defined more by her husband and by her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, than by her own accomplishments; her life virtually ends at the age of twenty-four, when Percy Shelley drowns. But with REVIEWS 361 the recent publication of The Journals of Mary Shelley, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (2 vols, 1987), The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited by Betty T. Bennett (3 vols, 1980-88), and the biography under review, Mary Shelley may at last be studied in her own right. Emily W. Sunstein, whose biography of Mary Wollstonecraft was published in 1975, originally "thought to present...