Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family

This book explores the lives and posthumous reputations of Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley, and Mary's parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the story of how Mary Shelley, haunted by the past, directly sought to enhance the public's appreciation of her husband and parents by the selective publication of relevant manuscripts. It also explains how she passed on this legacy to her son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley and his wife, Jane, Lady Shelley. As guardian of the archive until giving part of it to the Bodleian in 1893-4, Lady Shelley too helped shape the posthumous reputations of these important writers.

Drawing on the Bodleian Library's outstanding collections of letters, literary manuscripts, rare printed book and pamphlets, portraits and relics, including Shelley's working notebooks, a letter from Keats to Shelley, William Godwin's diary, and the original manuscripts of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Stephen Hebron charts the history of a family blessed with genius but marred by tragedy.

The final chapter by Elizabeth C. Denlinger of the New York Public Library explores the vagaries of Shelley's poetic manuscripts that slipped beyond the family's control. This highly illustrated book reproduces many archival documents and relics from the Shelley collections in the Bodleian Library and the New York Public Library, some of which are reproduced here for the first time.

Stephen Hebron has published widely in the field of British Romanticism, and curated a series of exhibitions at the Wordsworth Trust in Cumbria, England.
Elizabeth C. Denlinger is curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library.