Professor Explores Legacy of Frankenstein Author

Mary Shelley is best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein, but Salisbury University professor Lucy Morrison believes the British writer's legacy is broader.

In the 2010 collection of essays Mary Shelley: Her Circle and Her Contemporaries, Morrison rejects the characterization of Shelley as a "one-book author" and instead illustrates the full influence of the many works by the famed Romantic. In addition to being a novelist, Shelley was short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer and travel writer.

"This collection joins a conversation other scholars began in the 20th century--and leaves it with more remaining to be said in the decades to come," Morrison writes in the introduction.

The essays explore Shelley's place within the Romantic period. They illustrate her literary partnership with her husband, poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. They consider the influence that her well-known parents, political philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had on her career. They also examine her texts alongside those of contemporaries, including Thomas Moore and John Polidori.

Co-authored and edited with Dr. L. Adam Mekler of Morgan State University, the book was printed by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in the United Kingdom. Previously, Morrison has co-authored A Mary Shelley Encyclopedia and has published articles on women writers of the Romantic period in the Keats-Shelley Journal, Philological Quarterly, Persuasions Online and Romanticism on the Net.

Morrison is an associate professor in SU's English Department and specializes in British Romantic literature. She also is associate director of SU's Bellavance Honors program.