This collection covers the lyrical poetry of Mary Shelley, as well as her writings for Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia of Biography" and some other materials only recently attributed to her.

The Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld presents, for the first time, all the known surviving works of this major English writer, who lived from 1743 to 1825. Poet, essayist, editor, innovative writer for children, polemicist for religious and political reform, Barbauld helped set the agenda for Anglo-American culture for over a century. Her poems influenced Coleridge and Wordsworth; her writings on education, church-state relations, identity politics, and the ethics of citizenship are freshly relevant today; her commentary on books and writers went far to establish today's canon of English novelists. Beyond their importance, her writings are distinguished by great charm and profound intelligence. Volume 2 publishes Barbauld's ground-breaking Lessons for Children (4 vols., 1778-9) for the first time from the earliest surviving copies and reproduces these texts in a manner that honours, as far as possible, the special format the author desired. It also includes the first scholarly edition of Hymns in Prose for Children (1781); pieces in prose and verse associated with the Barbauld school at Palgrave (1774-85); her contributions to Evenings at Home (1793-6); the essays, jeux d'esprit, and poems she wrote for children or young women, many gathered by Lucy Aikin in A Legacy for Young Ladies, reviews of educational books from the Monthly Review; and a trove of previously unpublished letters on the subject of education to Lydia Rickards.

Beset by jealousy over an admirer of his wife's, Lord Lodore has come with his daughter Ethel to the American wilderness; his wife Cornelia, meanwhile, has remained with her controlling mother in England. When he finally brings himself to attempt a return, Lodore is killed en route in a duel. Ethel does return to England, and the rest of the book tells the story of her marriage to the troubled and impoverished Villiers (whom she stands by through a variety of tribulations) and her long journey to a reconciliation with her mother. Lodore's scope of character and of idea is matched by its narrative range and variety of setting; the novel's highly dramatic story-line moves at different points to Italy, to Illinois, and to Niagara Falls. And in this edition, which includes a wealth of documents from the period, the reader is provided with a sense of the full context out of which Shelley's achievement emerged.