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Lodore is a Romantic novel by Mary Shelley published in 1833. It concerns the fortunes and interpersonal relationships of the family of Lord Lodore, and is divided into three volumes, the first focusing on the life of Lodore himself; the second on his daughter, Ethel; and the third (I’d argue) on his wife, Cornelia, though Ethel is still important.

As a fan of Mary Shelley, I bought this book out of curiosity, thinking it might give me some insight into Mary’s post-Percy life. It does, but, to my pleasant surprise, I also found it utterly engrossing on its own merits. I would describe its main theme as the way that miscommunication, lack of communication, and personal bias can create huge, damaging rifts, and how a broadened perspective can sometimes rapidly mend them.

Now that I’ve oversold it, some caveats. The writing style is very old fashioned, definitely pre-Victorian. In addition to the older prose, it has a narrative technique that strongly prioritizes “telling” over “showing.” It may well have more paragraphs discoursing on people’s psyches than it has actual scenes of people doing and saying things. Often, it reads more like a modern fan essay on characters from a beloved story than the story itself. (But I like that kind of fan essay, so it worked for me!)

The writing style aside, the content has two signal strengths. 1) It is deeply psychologically insightful. 2) Despite what some critics have said, it is strongly feminist. It is, however, feminist in quiet, personal way. It depicts female characters as complex and fully human as the male characters. It often centers women’s experience and relationships with each other. It refuses to confine itself to the usual domain of the 19th-century “woman’s” novel: how the girl won the man (or died). It involves some of this, but it’s mostly concerned with people’s lives after marriage. It also does some incisive “showing” and “telling” about the disempowerment of women; it’s just not polemical about it. The point of the book is to examine human lives, and unfair trials loaded on women, in particular, are a piece of that. Make no mistake, though: this is truly a book by Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter.

Lodore has been called Shelley’s most Jane Austen-like book, but, in truth, it makes me think more of Oscar Wilde. To be clear, Shelley and Wilde have utterly different styles: where Wilde is witty, Shelley is invariably earnest. (For a modern reader, however, there is some unintentional hilarity, like "A smile irradiated her face.”) But both Wilde and Shelley are concerned with the exacting and shallow expectations of “society” and how the superficiality of "reputation" can damage relationships and hollow out people’s better selves.

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