Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by the Seattle Times

This groundbreaking dual biography, by accomplished historian and gifted storyteller Charlotte Gordon, brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. While each has been the subject of numerous biographies, no one has ever examined the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in one book—until now. In Romantic Outlaws, Gordon reunites the trailblazing author who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Romantic visionary who gave the world Frankenstein—two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy.

Two Lives, One Legacy

In 1797, less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft died, but her audacious path was just beginning to be mirrored in her daughter's life. Both women had passionate relationships with several men, bore children out of wedlock, and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history.

A Riveting Historical Narrative

The private lives of both Marys were nothing less than the stuff of great Romantic drama. Taking readers on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England, Gordon seamlessly interweaves the lives of her two protagonists in alternating chapters, creating a book that reads like a richly textured historical novel. She also paints unforgettable portraits of the men in their lives, including the mercurial genius Percy Shelley, the unbridled libertine Lord Byron, and the brilliant radical William Godwin. As Gordon writes, “Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every rule there was to break.”

Praise for Romantic Outlaws

“[An] impassioned dual biography . . . Gordon, alternating between the two chapter by chapter, binds their lives into a fascinating whole. She shows, in vivid detail, how mother influenced daughter, and how the daughter’s struggles mirrored the mother’s.”

—The Boston Globe