The result is a compelling portrait of Mary Shelley as she saw herself-an inventive, irreverent writer whose desire for political and social reform was at the heart of her literary expression for three decades.

In this book, Betty T. Bennett revises and expands the introduction she wrote for Pickering and Chatto's eight volume set, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. This introduction constitutes her first full critical consideration of the breadth of Mary Shelley's career and familiarizes readers with the often neglected realistic works that followed in the wake of Frankenstein (1818).