She shows, in vivid detail, how mother influenced daughter, and how the daughter's struggles mirrored the mother's.' - The Boston Globe Both Wollstonecraft and Shelley have been the subject of previous biographies-the author builds her account on a tremendous variety of sources and scholarship-but Gordon, alternating between the two chapter by chapter, binds their lives into a fascinating whole. Gordon brings a rousing zeal to her pages. Gordon, alternating between the two chapter by chapter, binds their lives into a fascinating whole. A truly revelatory biography, Romantic Outlaws reveals the defiant, creative lives of this daring mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid conventions of their era.

'Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every rule there was to break,' Gordon writes of Wollstonecraft and Shelley. Gordon 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. Taking readers on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England, she seamlessly interweaves the lives of her two protagonists in alternating chapters, creating a book that reads like a richly textured historical novel. The private lives of both Marys were nothing less than the stuff of great Romantic drama, providing fabulous material for Charlotte Gordon, an accomplished historian and a gifted storyteller. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history. Both women had passionate relationships with several men, bore children out of wedlock, and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Wollstonecraft's daughter Mary was to follow a similarly audacious path. In 1797, less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft died, and a remarkable life spent pushing against the boundaries of society's expectations for women came to an end. In Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte 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. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book-until now. This groundbreaking dual biography brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. Description NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SEATTLE TIMES

Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon