Although Frankenstein has now been canonized in the Romantic classroom, less attention then ever has been paid to the considerable corpus of Mary Shelley's other works - in fact, until now the excitement of the last decade over feminist themes found in Frankenstein has helped to obscure the actual persona of its author. By analysing a previously neglected body of reviews, essays, novellas, letters, biographies, sketches, and tales, and in locating Mary Shelley as a shrewd critic of the Romantic zeitgeist, the essays in this volume offer a ground-breaking, complete evaluation of one of the foremost thinkers of the 19th century.