A Life with Mary Shelley by Barbara Johnson (review)

As the bicentenary of the famous Genevan ghost story competition draws closer, it should come as no surprise that Romanticists across the world are reinvigorating Mary Shelley. The timing is thus auspicious for the appearance of Barbara Johnson’s last and unfinished work in A Life with Mary Shelley, which collects Johnson’s contributions to Shelley’s scholarly reputation. The apparatus surrounding Johnson’s own words makes the case for the new understanding into which Johnson’s work was poised to take us.

A Life with Mary Shelley first reproduces three 1980s essays Johnson wrote about or tangentially around her study of Shelley: her influential 1980 piece on The Last Man (1826), followed by her oft-cited 1982 “My Monster/My Self” (examining the monstrosity of motherhood), and concluding with “Gender Theory and the Yale School” (1984). These reprinted essays round out the homage of Mary Wilson Carpenter’s guiding “Introduction,” which surveys Johnson’s career from her dissertation in 1979 extending to her premature death at the age of sixty-one in 2009. Johnson’s impact on studies of Mary Shelley and feminist and biographical readings of her works, as well as the contributions her “Yale School” criticism have left indelibly upon subsequent schools of feminist scholarship, is unquestionable, as Judith Butler’s “Afterword. Animating Autobiography: Barbara Johnson and Mary Shelley’s Monster” lays out.

While Johnson’s influence is thus both established and documented, turning to her last work, Mary Shelley and Her Circle, reproduced in full here in sixty-seven pages, feels a little less secure. Johnson surveys the biography and overlappings of Mary Shelley’s life and career with those of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori in five separate chapters, melding the biographical, textual, and personal lines of thought almost imperceptibly as she circles the interactions of texts and biography smoothly. But the work, in its brevity, feels as though the circle is not quite completed. Thus Johnson can claim Lodore (1835) reveals “Mary Shelley had made peace with her mother” (95) but leaves readers unsure as to where such an assertion should extend, both textually and biographically. Indeed, the chapters on Mary Shelley’s engagement with the texts of her husband and Byron and Polidori are more vibrant than those dealing with the daughter’s textual and actual relationships; the chapters serve as an insightful overview of the principal complicated relationships impacting and extending beyond that evening by the lake in Geneva.

Shoshana Feldman’s “Afterword: Barbara Johnson’s Last Book” makes the case for the larger significance of the work preceding it: “At various landmark moments of her own career, Johnson was discussing Mary Shelley, whose life and work became at once a vessel for her pioneering feminist critique and a touchstone for her literary ingenuity and theoretical inventiveness” (123). Feldman’s exploration of Johnson’s “Circle” in the textual and biographical intersections of this last work finds that “rhetorical, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and political structures are tied up together, and are constantly shown to be profoundly implicated in one another” (126). But if Mary Shelley is, as Feldman proposes, “the absent center of the book” (131), where does that leave Johnson? For Feldman, Johnson aligns herself and her struggles—with male circles, with the body—with Mary Shelley’s in a reconfiguration of our understanding of Romanticism. Thus Mary Shelley was not on the margins of her own circle by default. The fire around which all the authors write is the metaphorical center for their work and inspiration, and it extends beyond their narratives and experiences to Johnson’s own: “No wonder, then, that Johnson, who lived as a theorist, dies as a storyteller. The story is a sufferance, an endurance. It is not just narrated: it endures and is endured” (151). And, ultimately, according to Feldman, Johnson closes her own circle through completing this last work and its insights into Mary Shelley’s career [End Page 579...