Reviews for Bibliography of the Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The average rating for Bibliography of the Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-10-28 00:00:00 Melissa Black Hell of a story although there are way too many Marys and Janes and Williams. They were brain-rich but name-poor in those days. 1787 - Mary Wollstonecraft, a well-educated 28 year old woman with no money and no husband, sick & tired of bad gigs as a governess, decides to become a writer. She gets some run of the mill stuff published but she is plotting something big which arrives five years later. 1792 - The first major feminist statement ever, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Yes, it raised eyebrows but it was a terrific success. In December MW decides to travel to Paris because there's an exciting revolution going on there. She arrives about a month before they guillotine King Louis. The guillotine was invented to make execution more humane, but it may have been useless trying to tell that to Louis. Mary thought the revolution was going to be where women finally got to be equal! She was disillusioned when it turned out all the revolutionaries had no time for her way too revolutionary thoughts. Also, she hung around with the wrong type of revolutionary. She was very surprised when they started to be guillotined too. Meanwhile over in Sussex, a boy is born to a filthy rich family. His name is Percy Shelley. 1793 - William Godwin, aged 37, atheist ex-minister, full time writer, publishes the sexy sounding Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Honestly, the marketing departments of publishers in the 1790s were pretty slack. I don't think they put enough importance on book titles. It should have been called Smash The State! because it was about anarchism. But it was still a big success, so what do I know. Over in Paris, MW meets an American called Gilbert Imlay, who was a shady character, described as an "adventurer" (these days that means you make documentaries in the Amazon jungle or run marathons in Antarctica but in those days it meant you swindled rich guys and shagged their wives). Anyway, she loved this guy. 1794 - MW gives birth to her first daughter, Fanny Imlay. Gilbert hangs around a bit but doesn't like this domestic turn of events so he is off to London. Meanwhile, WG, his pen on fire, published a great novel called Things as they Are, or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams. I have read this and it is RECOMMENDED. It was a big success, because it was EXCITING, and still is. 1795 - MW follows Gilbert back to London but finds he has other female entanglements and so in despair (you know, her situation was not good) she tries suicide by laudanum, but Gilbert rescues her from the lanky arms of Death. That was in April, but in October things hadn't improved and she made suicide attempt No 2 by jumping off Putney Bridge. This time she is saved by passing strangers. Just think - no passing strangers, NO FRANKENSTEIN. 1796 - MW re-meets WG and this time they click. 1797 - they get married in March. This was somewhat like Karl Marx getting married to Germaine Greer, it was a marriage made in atheistic radical socialistic anarchist heaven. But it is not to last because in September MW gives birth to her second daughter and dies 12 days later. The daughter's name is Mary. WG immediately begins a biography of MW - Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Another great title. Because he believes in total honesty and cutting through the bullshit pretensions of bourgeois morality, he includes details of MW's affairs & suicide attempts & fearlessly states they had sex before marriage. 1798 - Publication of Memoirs - it turns out everybody in the world is OUTRAGED by WG's bean-spilling. The reviewers say things like : blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands if they were FORCED to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world And it has the terrible effect of burying MW's feminism for many decades. She is now associated with immorality in the mind of the public, and therefore anything she said about the rights of women is ignored with a shudder. 1801 - WG marries again, so Mary has a stepmother, but she is not evil, only irritating. 1810 - Percy Shelley publishes a novel - he's 17 at the time. 1811 - Percy Shelley publishes The Necessity of Atheism, aged 18. This gets him chucked out of Oxford University. Just after he turns 19, he elopes with one of his sister's friends, who was 16 years old, and was named Harriet. This was to rescue her from an abusive home situation. I don't know why she was not called Mary. Then Shelley found out that WG was still alive. WG was his political idol. So this was like when the young white blues fans in the late 50s realised that guys like Son House and John Hurt were still alive, having assumed they were long dead. Shelley now HAD to meet WG!! 1812 - Mary finally meets her father's rich 20 year old superfan. She is 15. 1814 - After a year of living in Scotland, Mary is back in London & re-meets Shelley. This time they fall in love and decide to elope (he likes to elope). Yes, he's married and his wife is pregnant, but YOLO. They take Mary's step sister Jane (now calling herself Clair) with them. That might have been a mistake. It turned out that Shelley was into free love, so you know where this story is going. They went to France & Switzerland and came back when the money ran out just like students do now. Because Shelley's rich rich parents had cut him off without a penny after he wrote about the necessity of atheism and repeatedly eloped with teenage girls. Meanwhile Percy's abandoned wife Harriett gives birth to a son who managed to live until the age of 12. Some feat in those days. Meanwhile meanwhile, by the year end, Shelley is sleeping with both the women he's living with. Also around this time, he encourages a friend of his (called Hogg) to join the menage. In another age Shelley would have been a cult leader. Two girls for every boy, as the song says. But also, credit where it's due, under Shelley's leadership, two boys for every girl. 1815 - Mary gives birth to a daughter who dies after 13 days. 1816 - Mary gives birth to a son named Will. Claire (the cohabiting stepsister) manages to latch on to Lord Byron (he wasn't that enamoured). All 4 of them go on their holibobs to Geneva. They have a spooky night and dare each other to write a spooky story. Mary is the only one who takes it seriously and she writes Frankenstein . She is 18. In September they all come back to London. In October Fanny Imlay, Mary's other sister, commits suicide by laudanum for reasons unknown. In December, Harriett, Percy's wife, commits suicide by drowning in the Serpentine. This was for reasons too predictable to repeat here. But look on the bright side, Mary can now marry Percy, which she does 20 days after Harriet's suicide. 1817 - Mary gives birth to Clara, third child 1818 - During a journey across Italy, Clara dies 1819 - Mary's son Will dies. So now all three of her children are dead. 1822 -On 8 July , less than a month before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley drowns in a sudden storm in a boat on the Gulf of Spezia The day after the news of his death reached England, the Tory newspaper The Courier printed: Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is God or no. The rest of her life was not quite so crazy.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-14 00:00:00 Ethan Quillen I love the book Frankenstein so wanted to read more about the author and to learn what led her to write such a fascinating book. Unfortunately, I ended up skimming or skipping much of Mellor's book because she focused on feminism, incest, immorality, etc, but I did learn 2 interesting things: 1) 200 years ago, when Mary Shelley wrote about putting together a man out of body parts gathered from animals and cemeteries, then giving him the "spark of life", there were actually many scientists attempting to bring dead things to life. Some scientists attached electric wires to dead creatures and could get the bodies to sit up, open an eye, even clench a fist. Creepy, but amazing! 2) Mary Shelley is showing that if someone (i.e. Victor) goes about creating offspring without both a father and a mother, the child would not turn out emotionally healthy and could even turn out to be a monster. I found this argument VERY interesting given the big conflict in California over same-sex marriage. Children deserve both a father and a mother, and the book Frankenstein is just one more proof of the importance to society of bringing children to the world in the "traditional" way! Yes on prop 8! Yes on traditional marriage!