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We know the facts of Mary Shelley’s life in some detail—the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person—what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did—despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life.In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.
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The Glasites or Sandemanians were a branch of the church with their roots in Scotland, but who spread much wider. This study seeks to explore their distinctives, both of theology and practice, and to place them in a wider context. The examination of a small sect serves to illuminate the wider story, and this particular community nurtured within it several eminent thinkers whose influence has been of deep importance—not the least, the scientific pioneer Michael Faraday. In exploring both their growth and their decline, the author seeks to convey something of the flavor of this part of the church and to consider what their legacy is.