ABSTRACT
Writing for London Magazine in 1824, Mary Shelley decried the effects of the enclosure laws that had been reshaping the English countryside since the sixteenth century and privatizing the acreage that had been open to all. Shelley’s fascination with the wide open and oozy landscapes may have been a reaction to the disastrous effects of parliamentary enclosure. Shelley’s fictional works function as an important check on her spouse’s wish to be “absorbed” into the other, especially when it involves the male fantasy of returning to the womb. Remembering that the Shelleys were as committed to environmental justice as they were political justice for sexual minorities and gender-nonconformists contradicts the broad brush with which Pinker mischaracterizes European Romanticism as only one school of thought. Mary Shelley understood that diversity traverses submarine and dry lands.
