ABSTRACT
After her return to London in 1823, Mary Shelley found herself impoverished, both financially and emotionally. She immediately sought support: economically, by writing novels, stories, encyclopedia articles, and reviews, and psychologically, by turning to Jane Williams, her father, and any acquaintance who would give her an entry into that “society” whose affection and approval she so craved. Despite the pessimistic conclusions of The Last Man and the revised Frankenstein,she clung to her vision of the family as the only possible source of psychological satisfaction and cultural meaning for women. Forsaking the genres of Gothic and futurist fiction to utilize instead the more popular and commercially viable forms of the historical and the sentimental novel, Mary Shelley explored her ideology of the domestic affections within more realistic settings, variously the Guelf-Ghibelline conflicts of fourteenth-century Italy (in Valperga,which she had completed in 1821), the Yorkish uprisings of fifteenth-century England (in Perkin Warbeck),and the fashionable world of early nineteenth-century English society (in Mathilda,Lodore,and Falkner).
