Available on November 10th – NOW on Pre-order! I don’t know about you but this is going on my to-read list!! The synopsis sucked me right in. I will give my review when finished and the book will remain on my “Just Hatched” page (click here) to pre-order.
Vindicated, A Novel of Mary Shelley by Kathleen Williams Renk
Synopsis:
Mary Godwin is a teenager with a formidable pedigree. Both of her parents are philosophers but it is Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother she never met, who haunts her waking and dreaming worlds. Reading about her mother’s life and death inspires Mary to keep a journal. Just as the tumult of her parents’ relationship comes alive in her imagination, she meets emerging poet Percy Shelley. Even though he is married and his wife is pregnant, Shelley threatens to kill himself if Mary will not elope with him. It’s possible that Shelley is mad, but their intellectual and creative affinities convince her that she is his Child of Light.
Passionate and intellectual, Mary struggles with the demands of her volatile husband and their circle of friends, including her stepsister Claire and George Gordon, Lord Byron. But as she writes Frankenstein, she also muses about her encounters with her creature and the philosophical questions of life, death, and creation that undergird her novel. Justifying their unconventional life and enduring personal tragedies, Mary follows in her mother’s footsteps, as she contemplates a woman’s place in literature and the world.
Bio: Kathleen Williams Renk taught British and Women’s literature for nearly three decades in the U.S. and abroad. Her scholarly books include Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature: The Alchemical Literary Imagination (2012), and Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic “Victorians” (2020). Renk studied fiction writing at the University of Iowa with the Pulitzer-Prize winning author James Alan MacPherson. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Iowa City Magazine, Literary Yard, Page and Spine, and CC & D Magazine. Vindicated is her first novel.
Editorial Review:
“Vindicated is an admiring and graceful tribute to Mary Shelley, who was challenged to bridge her writing with the tasks of motherhood.” —Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews
“Shelley’s waking and dreaming worlds conspire to create the most famously human “monster” in literature. You’ll read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with new eyes after you have devoured this book.” —Mary Helen Stefaniak, award-winning author of The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia and The Turk and My Mother
Links to purchase Pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/Vindicated-Shelley-Kathleen-Williams-Renk/dp/1944453105
Comentarios