“... patriot and member of the London Corresponding Society, became friends with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft around the time of the French Revolution. One of the few – haunting – pieces of biographical information we have about Fenwick, indeed, is that she was present at the birth of Wollstonecraft’s daughter – the future ...”

“... the ‘screaming’ of ‘left-wing nuts and environmental kooks’. In the preface to her novel, Mary Shelley – who was well-acquainted with the Watsons of her day – made it plain that Victor Frankenstein’s project was ‘supremely frightful’, not because of the possibility of disastrous consequences, but because of his ‘human endeavour to ...”

“... of psychoanalytic insight to bear on the body in Balzac and Rousseau, James and Zola, Gauguin and Mary Shelley. If there is a unifying theme in this impressively diverse exploration, it is the way the body must be somehow marked or signed in order to enter narrative, pass from brute fact to active meaning. ‘Signing the body,’ Brooks ...”

“... moved from the grand abstraction of the sublime, Eco writes, to the centre of the human soul, as Mary Shelley dreams up her pathetic monster. Ugliness was further relativised and humanised; it was searched for and discovered to be everywhere. The uncanny is a kind of ugliness very near to home. Dr Hyde emerges and the formal invention of the unconscious ...”

“... first book, Child of Light (1951), a biographical study that more or less singlehandedly rescued Mary Shelley from being dismissed as Percy Bysshe’s excessively pious and/or difficult widow, views Frankenstein and The Last Man as – in Spark’s approving words from a Third Programme broadcast – ‘unconscious satires’ of ...”

“... that in the great scheme of things relations between men and women were a ‘trivial matter’. Mary Wollstonecraft soon put paid to that notion. When he met her first at dinner in 1792, Godwin was irritated by her bubbling assertiveness. But he met her again, and his tempestuous relationship with her in 1796 and 1797, their brief life together as husband ...”

“... What will be left to say of Faust? The book’s success was immediate, phenomenal, European. And Mary Shelley was astute in making it, with its ‘lofty sentiments’, the favourite reading of her sad monster: an excess of feeling would appeal to a creature officially permitted to have no feeling. But Werther, it seems to me, is of its age, the Age of ...”

“... The Romantics took up Burke’s notion and endorsed it. Spufford focuses on Frankenstein, in which Mary Shelley made the Antarctic, the white empty space where no one had been, the setting for the struggle between what was and was not human, a battle between flesh and ice. Cook’s crossing of the Antarctic Circle in 1773 and his exploration of Alaska in ...”

“... theatre history, but she has not erected the conventional pious monument. It is hard to imagine Mary Shelley canvassing the opinions of former secretaries, asking how the Shelley ménage struck them at the time, or the second Mrs Hardy interviewing the novelist’s former mistresses, discussing his sexual ...”

“... find their subject frequently recommending life before poetry. Unlike his friend and contemporary Shelley, with his ideas about the secular holiness of poetry, Byron was lordly in his dismissal of verse, which he invariably described as a diversion from more important matters. ‘Poetry should only occupy the idle,’ he declared a few months before his death ...”

“... mathematics at the highest level and engage with the best scientific minds of her generation, Mary Somerville, Michael Faraday, William Whewell and Charles Babbage among them. The passion for numbers and experiments was inherited from Annabella, who was christened by Byron on one of their happier days ‘Princess of Parallelograms’, but in Ada it was ...”

“... wasn’t the first to connect Peacock’s name with the showy wit of his satires. It started with Shelley, his friend and patron, who joked in 1820 about ‘the Pavonian Psyche’ (pavo: peacock), as though Peacock himself had the kind of name that he specialised in giving to his characters. In the seven novels he produced between Headlong Hall (1815) and ...”

“... Mary Wollstonecraft’s defenders have always found their task difficult. Writing her life to disastrous effect in 1798, intent on establishing her as one of those beings ‘endowed with the most exquisite and delicious sensibility, whose minds seem almost of too fine a texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is transport, and disappointment is agony indescribable’, an ‘incomparable woman’ than whom ‘perhaps no human creature ever suffered greater misery’, a ‘female Werther’, even a second Goethe, the still grieving widower William Godwin was forced to concede that his improbable dear was ‘what Dr Johnson would have called, “a very good hater” ...”

“... the church and heave a sigh or two before continuing via a gate set in the cemetery wall to the Mary Rankin Wing of St Pancras Hospital. As a young man, Thomas Hardy supervised the removal of bodies from part of the cemetery to make way for the trains. He placed the headstones round an ash tree sapling, now grown tall, where I stop sometimes to look at the ...”

“... this up by examining the remarkable letters written by Mrs Thrale, the Elizabeth Montagu set, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Elizabeth Foster; the Duchess’s novel Sylph is not treated, either. In the second half of the book, ‘Literary Achievements’, we are on firmer ground: but here the first seven chapters concern novels ...”