That said, Fiona Sampson is a poet and the style is suitably literary and a little self-indulgent. I also thought there were too many questions without answers, as if the book was fiction. placing ourselves in 1818 or whenever), then saying what is going to happen to her, then presenting all this from the perspective of today, was too muddled. However, telling us what Mary is doing now (i.e. I think if only the present tense was used, this might have worked better. What grated on me was the mixture of tenses, which for a biography of someone who lived two hundred years ago was quite odd to read. Evidence for Mary’s childhood is scarce so the author did an excellent job of piecing these early years together. The first couple of chapters were especially good. It wasn’t a bad reading experience and I did learn a lot about Mary Shelley, her friends and the times they lived in. I really wanted to like it but unfortunately the writing style was too strange. This is an unusual biography of Mary Shelley, the author best known for Frankenstein and The Last Man.
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