Beset by jealousy over an admirer of his wife's, Lord Lodore has come with his daughter Ethel to the American wilderness; his wife Cornelia, meanwhile, has remained with her controlling mother in England.  When he finally brings himself to attempt a return, Lodore is killed en route in a duel.  Ethel does return to England, and the rest of the book tells the story of her marriage to the troubled and impoverished Villiers (whom she stands by through a variety of tribulations) and her long journey to a reconciliation with her mother.

Lodore's scope of character and of idea is matched by its narrative range and variety of setting; the novel's highly dramatic story-line moves at different points to Italy, to Illinois, and to Niagara Falls.  And in this edition, which includes a wealth of documents from the period, the reader is provided with a sense of the full context out of which Shelley's achievement emerged.

Comments:

“Not the one book author that Frankenstein sometimes make her seem, Mary Shelley was a complex and committed social thinker whose novels reveal her deep concern with the impact of the emerging Victorian social dynamic upon the lives of women.  While Lodore reflects Shelley's conviction of the importance to the new bourgeois family model of the ‘genuine affections of the human heart,' it shows us too, in the person of the remarkable Fanny Derham, the consequences for a free-thinking and independent woman who has learned ‘to be afraid of nothing.'  Vargo's splendid edition resituates Shelley within the 1830s milieu of successful literary women like Landon and Hemans who understood their readers and their marked, and within a culture that was moving rapidly away from the exuberant Romanticism of only two decades earlier.  With its illuminating critical introduction, and its extensive contextualizing appendices, this exceptional edition will alert readers anew to the complexity and sophistication of Shelley's mind and art.” - Stephen C. Behrendt, University of Nebraska

"This volume marks yet another excellent addition to Broadview's expanding list of literary writings that have long been out of print." - Nineteenth-Century Literature

"Vargo has provided a much-needed, comprehensive edition of the text." - University of Toronto Quarterly

Lisa Vargo, educated at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Toronto, is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan.

Academics please note that this is a title classified as having a restricted allocation of complimentary copies. While the availability of bound complimentary copies is restricted to desk copies only, electronic complimentary copies are readily available for those professors wishing to consider this title for possible course adoption. Should you choose to adopt the book after viewing an electronic copy we will be happy to provide a bound desk copy.

Table of Contents: [Back to Top]

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Mary Shelley: A Brief Chronology

A Note on the Text

Lodore

Appendix A: Mary Shelley—Woman of Letters

1. “The Bride of Modern Italy” (1824)
2. From Review of The Loves of the Poets (1829)
3. From Review of Cloudesley; A Tale (1830)
4. From “Ugo Foscolo,” Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal (1837)

Appendix B: Some Literary Contexts

1. George Gordon, Lord Byron, from Lara (1814)
2. The Tempest and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Female Reader (1797)
3. Thomas Campbell, from Gertrude of Wyoming (1809)
4. Edward John Trelawny, from Adventures of a Younger Son (1831)

Appendix C: Illinois and Duelling

1. Morris Birkbeck, from Letters from Illinois (1818)
2. William Cobbett, from A Year’s Residence in America (1818-19)
3. Frances Wright, from Views of Society and Manners in America (1821)
4. William Godwin, from Enquiry Concerning the Political Justice, Third Edition (1798)
5. James Fenimore Cooper, from Notions of the Americans (1828)

Appendix D: Domesticity and Women’s Education

1. Mary Wollstonecraft, from Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
2. Mary Wollstonecraft, from Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
3. William Godwin, from The Enquirer (1797)
4. Anna Jameson, from Characteristics of Women (1832)
5. Sarah Stickney Ellis, from The Women of England (1839)

Appendix E: Contemporary Reviews of Lodore

1. From The Athenaeum
2. From The Examiner
3. From Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country
4. From Leigh Hunt’s London Journal
5. From The Literary Gazette
6. From New Monthly Magazine
7. From The Sun

Select Bibliography