ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the mother-daughter duo, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, each exemplary of 'first' and 'second' generation Romanticism, are engaged in an intertextual debate over the nature, content and efficacy of rights discourse, there by rendering a novel judgement that reconceives that discourse's origins and ends. The image of monstrosity deployed by Wollstonecraft is interesting in terms of narrative prolepsis, anticipating but providing a very neat tropological segues into the most famous text of her daughter, Shelley: specifically, Frankenstein. Two different and, indeed, seemingly irreconcilable critiques of liberalism run in tandem throughout Frankenstein, a doubleness which speaks to Shelley's own conflicted politics. On one hand, she is a kind of protoMarxist, as a political, social and sexual subversive in her youth but also as the wife. On the other hand, Shelley can be characterised as an organic conservative, as befitting the wife, widow and mother of an heir to a baronetcy and stately home.
