Press Release

Exhibition on Mother and Daughter Authors Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley Opens May 3

On the 200th anniversary of the death and birth, respectively, of writers Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, The New York Public Library is mounting an exhibition about two complicated and creative women who forged independent lives through their work. Visionary Daughters of Albion: A Bicentenary Celebration of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley will display their writings and those of the most important people in their literary circles, including early editions, manuscripts, correspondence, and a number of portraits and prints. The exhibition opens May 3 in The Edna Barnes Salomon Room at The New York Public Library's Center for the Humanities at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and will remain on view through September 13, 1997.

In the summer of 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), died shortly after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818) and wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The more than 350 items on display in Visionary Daughters of Albion are drawn mostly from the Library's Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, one of the world's leading repositories for the study of English Romanticism.

The exhibition takes its title from William Blake's 1793 poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion [ancient England]. The curators of the exhibition, Stephen Wagner and Doucet Devin Fischer, agree that like Blake's poem, the works of both Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley challenged the sexual oppression and possessive morality of their day.

Mary Wollstonecraft
Divided into two sections, the exhibition is organized chronologically: the first section focuses on Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and the second on Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Wollstonecraft came of age in the years preceding the French Revolution and lived in Paris during the Reign of Terror. She belonged to a group of dissident writers and artists who met regularly at the home of the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. The group included the anarchist philosopher William Godwin (her future husband), Henry Fuseli, Thomas Paine, Joel Barlow, Joseph Priestley, William Blake, and Erasmus Darwin, all of whom are represented by their work in the exhibition.

The English literary response to the French Revolution forms an important component of Visionary Daughters of Albion. Richard Price, Thomas Paine, and Joseph Priestley -- along with Wollstonecraft -- wrote replies to Edmund Burke's famous conservative polemic, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). An important influence on Wollstonecraft was the writings of a towering figure of the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His refusal to include women in his books on educational reform inspired Wollstonecraft to produce her single most important work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which has earned her a place in history as the architect of modern feminism.

Among Wollstonecraft's other published books on display are Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and Original Stories from Real Life (1788), the latter with illustrations by William Blake. Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, was published posthumously in 1798; its title was an ironic twist on the "rights" of women for which she had long advocated.

A letter from Mary Wollstonecraft written days before she gave birth to the future Mary Shelley reveals Wollstonecraft's impatience "to regain my activity, and to reduce to some shapeliness the portly shadow, which meets my eye when I take a musing walk." This day was never to come as she died ten days after giving birth. Her namesake daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley), spent a motherless childhood in an intellectually challenging environment where she was one of five children, none of whom shared the same two parents. Like her mother, she was later associated with many of the leading writers of the day, including Lord Byron, Thomas Love Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Prosper Mérimée, Washington Irving, Lady Morgan, and Caroline Norton, all of whose works are represented in the exhibition.

Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley's first published work on view is a charming little book (Mounseer Nongtongpaw, 1808) written for the Juvenile Library, her father's publishing firm. Enduring school-age classics published there on display include Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespear (1807) and Johann Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson (1816). Though still married to his first wife, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) declared his love to the teenaged Mary Godwin on the grave of her mother.

They fled England for the Continent accompanied by Godwin's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, whose 1814 manuscript journal, on view, chronicles their travels. Among P. B. Shelley's early writings on display are Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: with Notes (1813), perhaps the most audacious of his early works, completed when he was not yet 21. In 1816, Shelley's wife Harriet Westbrook threw herself into the Serpentine and drowned, leaving behind two children by Shelley and giving him the freedom to re-marry. Westbrook's suicide note, wishing for Shelley the happiness of which she felt deprived, is on view in the exhibition.

Pregnant with Lord Byron's child, Claire Clairmont accompanied Shelley and Mary in 1816 to Byron's Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where Byron had removed himself from a disapproving England. It was there that this group experienced the "wet, ungenial summer" during which Shelley and Byron began the literary and personal dialogue that would continue for the remainder of their abbreviated lives. While there, Mary Shelley literally dreamed up Frankenstein (1818), one of the most enduring and popular novels of the 19th century, which she wrote and published before she was 21. Several 19th- and 20th-century editions of Frankenstein are displayed in the exhibition, along with examples of advertisements surrounding its early theatrical productions.

In 1818, the Shelleys left England for the third and last time, settling in Italy. While traveling, Mary wrote two novels and two verse dramas, and Shelley produced his finest poems including Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. During their years abroad they suffered the deaths of their first two children and of Lord Byron and Claire's lovechild. In the summer of 1822, Shelley's drowning at sea was the final tragedy.

After her husband's death, Mary Shelley returned to England with her surviving child and continued to write. The remainder of her life was spent writing biographies, short stories, and four more novels. One of her later novels on view, The Last Man (1826), is set in the 21st century and projects an apocalyptic vision of war, plague, and human extinction. Though she never remarried, Mary Shelley had many romantic friendships; these included the American authors John Howard Payne and Washington Irving, as well as a French novelist, an English member of Parliament, and an Italian revolutionary and blackmailer. In 1851, Mary Shelley succumbed to a brain tumor and died, with her son and daughter-in-law by her side.

The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle: A History, A Biography, and A Guide is available in soft cover for $14.95 in both New York Public Library Shops.

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