Religion Around Mary Shelley by Jennifer L. Airey (review)

Though recent studies on Mary Shelley have helped correct reductive impressions of her as "either the young ingénue author of Frankenstein or as Percy Shelley's grieving widow" (Airey, 8), much of this reevaluation has failed to make significant inroads into the undergraduate classroom or broader public discussion. Airey's work stands to rectify this state of affairs. Historically rigorous, ambitious in scope, and always, without fail, lucid and clear, Airey offers an overview of Shelley's life and works that emphasizes her "as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period, one who developed a belief system that was both influenced by and profoundly different from those of her more often analyzed male counterparts" (2). The breadth of Airey's project means that many of her arguments will be familiar to those acquainted with scholarship on Mary Shelley, as well as late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century religious developments. But the value of Religion Around Mary Shelley inheres in how accessibly and compellingly it brings together Shelley's biography, nineteenth-century religious debates, and readings of Shelley's later and lesser-known works. The outward effortlessness of this achievement is all the more impressive considering of the volume of Shelley's writings and the complexity of "religion" before and during her lifetime.

The main intervention of Religion Around Mary Shelly is this: when we understand Shelley as a religious thinker who carefully considered the political, social, and spiritual ramifications of the religious developments around her, we begin to trace a "logical evolution" that thematically unites her writings—a movement from doubt and despair to the discovery of spiritual consolation in an ethic and practice of "family and interpersonal love" (136, 10). For Airey, the merit of this approach largely subsists in its de-privileging of Frankenstein relative to Shelley's other works. Instead "equal weight" is given "to her writings at all stages of her life" (9).

Significantly contributing to the clarity of this book is its organizational structure. Opening with a short introduction that lays out the aims and a general overview of the book, Airey dives immediately into "Religion Around Romanticism" (Chapter 1) and "Religion Around Mary Shelley" (Chapter 2), which give historical context for the chapters to follow. Tracing major religious conflicts within the religious milieu of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as well as the particular ideas originating from and circulating among the familial, scientific, and cultural circles to which Shelley belonged, these chapters take up, for instance, the influence of Dissent, anti-Catholicism, atheism, propheticism, Manichaeism, and more. Thus, the opening chapters lay the groundwork for readings of Shelley's works in chapters 3 ("Doubt"), 4 ("Despair"), and 5 ("Domesticity"), which themselves are chronologically ordered, examining, respectively, the author's early, middle, and late novels and stories. The result is that the same arguments are revisited several times across chapters, but with different emphases each time. In other words, while each chapter stands alone, there is an iterative, accretive quality to this book: particular themes show up again and again in different chapters, but are differently emphasized or used to different effect (that is, Shelley's doubt regarding the existence of a benevolent God is placed in a broader historical context in earlier chapters, while later chapters trace various expressions of this doubt across the corpus of Shelley's works).

I find particularly invigorating Airey's readings of Shelley's last novels, in which she questions the presumption that they represent conservative reactions against her "parents' radicalism and the unconventionality of her younger years" (127). The resonance Airey locates between Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More (despite More's antipathy to Wollstonecraft) not only helps explain why Shelley's domestic turn doesn't preclude a commitment to "feminine power" (158). It also productively adds to a body of scholarship demonstrating the ways some radical ideals found (at times, surprising) homes in evangelical circles.

What could be more fully...