Lodore

Front Cover
Broadview Press, Jan 31, 1997 - Fiction - 555 pages

Beset by jealousy over an admirer of his wife’s, Lord Lodore has come with his daughter Ethel to the American wilderness; his wife Cornelia, meanwhile, has remained with her controlling mother in England. When he finally brings himself to attempt a return, Lodore is killed en route in a duel. Ethel does return to England, and the rest of the book tells the story of her marriage to the troubled and impoverished Villiers (whom she stands by through a variety of tribulations) and her long journey to a reconciliation with her mother.

Lodore’s scope of character and of idea is matched by its narrative range and variety of setting; the novel’s highly dramatic story-line moves at different points to Italy, to Illinois, and to Niagara Falls. And in this edition, which includes a wealth of documents from the period, the reader is provided with a sense of the full context out of which Shelley’s achievement emerged.

From inside the book

Contents

Preface
7
A Note on the Text
41
Lodore
47
Mary ShelleyWoman of Letters
449
Some Literary Contexts
472
Illinois and Duelling
483
William Godwin from Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Third Edition
493
Domesticity and Womens Education
500
Contemporary Reviews of Lodore
531
From The Literary Gazette
543
Select Bibliography
550
Copyright

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Page 267 - Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date...
Page 475 - There was in him a vital scorn of all ; As if the worst had fall'n which could befall, He stood a stranger in this breathing world.
Page 288 - HOW like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December's bareness every where! And yet this time removed was summer's time; The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, Like widow'd wombs after their lords...
Page 344 - There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told, When two, that are link'd in one heavenly tie, With heart never changing and brow never cold, Love on through all ills, and love on till they die...
Page 464 - The discovery of its antitype; the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own ; an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret; with a frame whose nerves, like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own ; and of a combination of all these in such proportion as the type within demands ; this...
Page 465 - ... this is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which there is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules.
Page 464 - It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.

About the author (1997)

Lisa Vargo educated at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Toronto, is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan.

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