ABSTRACT
Like other English Romantics, Mary Shelley viewed Cervantes as both a political and literary hero. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the biographer and her subject as it emerges in this hybrid of life-writing and literary critique. It examines the possible presence of Cervantes's writing as subtext in Shelley's own fiction. There are references to Don Quixote throughout Shelley's writing. While this reference need not imply an explicit likening of the Shelleys to the knight and his squire as some critics have inferred, it does suggest a strong presence of Cervantes's protagonists in Shelley's consciousness. It is evident that Mary Shelley felt a special affinity with Cervantes in 1837 as she wrote his life. Her emphasis upon adversity and suffering is Romantic in sensibility, yet may also reflect the sorrows and devastating loss she had experienced in her own life, including the misfortunes of her father's career.
