Mary Shelley

Williams makes a genuine case that Mary Shelley deserves a fuller literary reputation than Frankenstein alone earns her, and the scholarly grounding is solid for an entry-level academic biography. The problem is brevity — at this length it reads more like an annotated syllabus than a biography, and longer works like Miranda Seymour's do the same job with far more depth and narrative life. Good for a course reading list, but casual readers will want more.