Anti-Social Sociability: Mary Shelley and the Posthumous "Pisa Gang"

Julian North's 2009 book on biography in the Romantic period, The Domestication of Genius, makes a crucial reassessment of the role of biography in our understanding of the Romantic poets.1 In her discussion of Mary Shelley, North is especially attentive to Shelley's affinity, developed in the biographies she wrote for Dionysius Lardner in Lives of Eminent Men, with the radical implications of biography as exemplified in Lives by William Godwin and Mary Hays. [...]Mary Shelley can represent herself as the only one remaining who understands a certain strand of free thinking, even if this belies the others still living, because she is under no ideological commitment to keep faith with those others.