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Religion Around Mary Shelley

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Mary Shelley lived and wrote during an age of religious instability, one that witnessed the spread of atheism, millenarianism, Methodism, Unitarianism, and Evangelicalism, among other belief systems. In this book, Jennifer L. Airey foregrounds Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period, analyzing her creative engagement with the religious controversies around her and uncovering a belief system that was both influenced by and profoundly different from those of her male Romantic counterparts.
 
Previous assessments of religion in Shelley's work have been limited in scope and, as Airey asserts, have tended to privilege the novels she wrote when she was married to the prominent atheist Percy Shelley and shortly after his death. Such readings imply that Shelley and her works are most interesting for what they can tell us about her husband and second-generation (and predominantly male) Romanticism. Airey's analysis corrects this imbalance by giving equal weight to Shelley's later work, which draws on Evangelical discourses elevating the mother as the theological and moral center of the household.
 
Nuanced and accessible, Religion Around Mary Shelley makes visible the valuable insight that Shelley's works offer into the complexity of religious views prominent in her cultural moment. It will appeal to specialists and nonacademics interested in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley circle.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Religion Around Romanticism

2. Religion Around Mary Shelley

3. Doubt

4. Despair

5. Domesticity

Conclusion: On Ghosts

Notes

Works Cited

Index



“Jennifer L. Airey writes eloquently about Shelley’s faith and her complex relationship with the various discourses around religion current in the early nineteenth century. Historically grounded and deeply informed, Religion Around Mary Shelley presents a welcome emphasis on many of Shelley’s lesser-studied works and later works, giving us a fuller picture of a writer for whom the creative process of thought and composition was deeply inflected by her rational imagination.”

—Jacqueline Labbe, author of Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender, and Romanticism

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