A Life with Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley and Jacques Derrida are presiding geniuses in this uneven anthology commemorating the late Harvard literary critic Johnson (1947–2009). Comprising Johnson’s works on Shelley, plus new essays by distinguished colleagues, the volume presents Johnson as a significant figure in the academic study of Shelley and the Romantic Movement. Thus, three of her classic essays, reprinted here, are credited with helping to canonize the Frankenstein author as a major English novelist. In reading them, though, beware a certain esotericism—as they are classics not just of Shelley studies but of Derridean deconstruction, and oracular in the style of that school. Elsewhere, commentaries by Johnson’s colleagues are sometimes more daunting than Johnson’s works, which they explicate. By comparison, the more accessible new work, “Mary Shelley and Her Circle,” narrates the lives of various Shelley cohorts, depicting a collaborative model of Romantic creativity, thus contradicting the “solitary genius” myth that clings to Shelley’s husband, Percy, and his friend Lord Byron. With this rebuttal to Romantic egotism, Johnson collaborates in Shelley’s own projects—since in her telling, Shelley is a proto-feminist engaged in a “deconstruction” of myths of (male) Romantic authorship. Framing the careers of novelist and critic in parallel is a major theme of this often recondite anthology, whose subject is indeed Johnson’s life with Shelley—not, primarily, Shelley herself. (July)