Lodore

Lodore, also published under the title The Beautiful Widow, is the
penultimate novel by Romantic novelist Mary Shelley, completed
in 1833 and published in 1835.[1]

Contents
Plot and themes
Reception
Notes
Bibliography
External links

Plot and themes

Title page from Lodore (1835)
In Lodore, Shelley focused her theme of power and responsibility
on the microcosm of the family.[2] The central story follows the
fortunes of the wife and daughter of the title character, Lord Lodore, who is killed in a duel at the end of the
first volume, leaving a trail of legal, financial, and familial obstacles for the two "heroines" to negotiate.
Mary Shelley places female characters at the centre of the ensuing narratives: Lodore's daughter, Ethel,
raised to be over-dependent on paternal control; his estranged wife, Cornelia, preoccupied with the norms
and appearances of aristocratic society; and the intellectual and independent Fanny Derham, with whom
both are contrasted.[3]

The novel's modern editor, Lisa Vargo, has noted the text's engagement with political and ideological
issues, particularly the education and social role of women.[4] She suggests that Lodore dissects a
patriarchal culture that separated the sexes and pressured women into dependence on men.[5] In the view of
critic Betty T. Bennett, "the novel proposes egalitarian educational paradigms for women and men, which
would bring social justice as well as the spiritual and intellectual means by which to meet the challenges life
invariably brings".[6]

Reception
Lodore was a success with the reviewers: Fraser's Magazine praised its "depth and sweep of thought", for
example; and it prompted The Literary Gazette to call Mary Shelley "one of the most original of our
modern writers".[7] Later nineteenth-century critics were more dubious: in 1886, Edward Dowden called
Lodore "biography transmuted for the purposes of fiction"; in 1889, Florence Marshall remarked that
Lodore was "written in a style that is now out of date".[8] It was believed for instance that Ethel's encounter
with Clorinda Saville was based upon Emilia Viviani.[9]

Notes
1. Vargo, Introduction to Lodore, 14; Bunnell, 153. Mary Shelley finished Lodore in 1833, but
the book was delayed at the publishers.
2. Bennett, An Introduction, 91–92, 97.
3. Bennett, An Introduction, 93–95; Bunnell, 155.
4. Vargo, Introduction to Lodore, 21, 32.
5. As Vargo points out, for example, Mary Shelley emphasises that "Ethel had received, so to
speak, a sexual education" (Lodore, Vol. III, Chap 2). Vargo, Introduction to Lodore, 35.
6. Bennett, An Introduction, 92, 96.
7. Vargo, Introduction to Lodore, 18–19.
8. Vargo, Introduction to Lodore, 19–20; Bunnell, 161. Autobiographical incidents include
scenes between Ethel and Edward drawn from Mary Shelley's life with Percy Shelley.
9. White 1972, pp. 605, 679.

Bibliography
Bennett, Betty T. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8018-5976-X.
Bunnell, Charlene E. "All the World's a Stage": Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley's
Novels. New York: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-93863-5.
Bunnell, Charlene E. "The Illusion of 'Great Expectations': Manners and Morals in Mary
Shelley's Lodore and Falkner". Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein":
Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth. Eds. Syndy M. Conger,
Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1997.
Cronin, Richard. "Mary Shelley and Edward Bulwer: Lodore as Hybrid Fiction". Mary versus
Mary. Eds. Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Giovanna Silvani. Naples: Liguori, 2001.
Gonda, Caroline. "Lodore and Fanny Derham's Story". Women's Writing 6.3 (1999): 329–44.
Hopkins, Lisa. "'A Medea, in More Senses than the More Obvious One': Motherhood in Mary
Shelley's Lodore and Falkner". Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2002): 383–405.
Joffe, Sharon Lynne. The Kinship Coterie and the Literary Endeavors of the Women in the
Shelley Circle. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.
Jowell, Sharon. "Mary Shelley's Mothers: The Weak, the Absent, and the Silent in Lodore
and Falkner". European Romantic Review 8.3 (1997): 298–322.
Kilroy, James F. The Nineteenth Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative
Form. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Shelley, Mary. Lodore. Ed. Lisa Vargo. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997. ISBN 1-55111-077-
6.
Sites, Melissa. "Re/membering Home: Utopian Domesticity in Mary Shelley's Lodore". A
Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle's Utopian Project. Ed. Darby Lewes. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2003. ISBN 0-7391-0472-1.
Stafford, Fiona. "Lodore: A Tale of the Present Time?". Mary Shelley's Fiction: From
Frankenstein to Falkner. Eds. Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Nora Crook. New York:
Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000.
Vallins, David. "Mary Shelley and the Lake Poets: Negotiation and Transcendence in
Lodore". Mary Shelley's Fiction: From Frankenstein to Falkner. Eds. Michael Eberle-Sinatra
and Nora Crook. New York: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000.
Vargo, Lisa. "Further Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: Lodore as an Imagined
Conversation with Mary Wollstonecraft". Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing
Lives. Eds. Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 2001.
 Vargo, Lisa. "Lodore and the 'Novel of Society'". Women's Writing 6.3 (1999): 425–40.
Vargo, Lisa. "The Aikins and the Godwins: Notions of Conflict and Stoicism in Anna
Barbauld and Mary Shelley". Romanticism 11.1 (2005): 84–98.
White, Newman Ivey (1972). Shelley. 2. New York City, NY: Octagon Press, Limited.
ISBN 978-0-374-98426-7.
Williams, Nicholas. "Angelic Realism: Domestic Idealization in Mary Shelley's Lodore".
Studies in the Novel 39.4 (2007): 397–415.

External links
Lodore (1835) (https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_BwpnZHJ5PAwC) from Google Books
Lodore (https://librivox.org/search?title=Lodore&author=SHELLEY&reader=&keywords=&
genre_id=0&status=all&project_type=either&recorded_language=&sort_order=catalog_date
&search_page=1&search_form=advanced) public domain audiobook at LibriVox

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This page was last edited on 12 March 2020, at 01:52 (UTC).

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