Was Romantic Outlaws worth the listening time?

I don't recall listening to Susan Lyon before, but I certainly enjoyed her performance in this case-very well done. Have you listened to any of Susan Lyons’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

If I could reconstruct this book, I'd tell Mary Wollstonecraft's tale first, then begin that of her daughter, Mary Shelley. But I got tired of having to make the effort. Of course I figured out my mistakes immediately. But that attempt at clarification did not fend off all confusion, since both mother and daughter are inconveniently named Mary! Many times as I listened, I wondered how the Mary of the current chapter had suddenly become much older or younger than she had been a few moments earlier, or how the current Mary had suddenly wound up in a country that she had not intended to visit at that point in her life. Yes, each chapter began with the woman's name and the years covered. Consequently, the reader is jerked back or forward through time at the start of every chapter. The odd numbered chapters cover the life story of one, and the even numbered chapters cover the life of the other. How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?įor some (dumb) reason, the biographies of this mother and daughter are arranged in alternating chapters in this book. See my next answer, which covers the aspect of this book that I liked the least. I learned a great deal about both from this book, and find them to have been remarkable and admirable women in most respects. I am happy to now be able to say the opposite. I knew little about Mary Shelley other than that she wrote Frankenstein and was married to the poet, Shelley. What did you like best about Romantic Outlaws? What did you like least? The narrative takes listeners from Revolutionary France to the Scottish Highlands, from Victorian England to the canals of Venice, flowing like an engrossing historical novel. Wollstonecraft published the first full articulation of women's rights in 1792, risking her reputation and sometimes her life in pursuit of her radical goals, while her daughter Mary Shelley wrote the masterpiece Frankenstein in 1819, and famously professed her love to the poet Percy Shelley on her mother's grave.Īlthough these two women never really knew each other, their lives were so closely intertwined and eerily similar that it seems impossible to consider one without the other: Both became writers both fell in love with brilliant but impossible men, and were single mothers who had children out of wedlock both struggled to negotiate their need for love and companionship with their need for independence. Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.

Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon