Romantic Outlaws

Charlotte Gordon reunites a mother and daughter tragically separated at birth in this rousing and surpassingly readable epic spanning the Romantic era. Wordsworth and Byron must step aside to make room for two brilliant women, Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, early and late Romantics whose remarkable contributions to their time and ours lend Gordon’s artfully twined tale special significance

Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and The Peabody Sisters

A gripping account of the heartbreaks and triumphs of two of history's most formidable female intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Gordon has reunited mother and daughter through biography, beautifully weaving their narratives for the first time.

Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire

The relationship between Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft is explored with remarkable insight and perspicacity in this exhilarating dual biography… Gordon’s lucid prose and multi-faceted appraisal… makes warm-blooded and fully fleshed-out people of writers who exist for readers today only as the literary works they left behind.

*Starred* Publisher’s Weekly

A most welcome deeper take on the women who scandalized Victorian England - and whose stories continue to resonate today.

Vogue

Mother and daughter shadow and reveal each other. The retelling emphasises the extent to which Shelley’s life was shaped by her mother’s legacy but here is underlined in thought-provoking ways... In Gordon’s narrative, [Wollstonecraft and Shelley] appear at their best and bravest.

Daisy Hay, Observer

A mother and daughter who changed not only the way we think, but the way we are… extraordinary women, a dozen decades ahead of their time… Romantic Outlaws enables readers to compare the different ways in which these two remarkable women confronted their tragically different destinies… [A] thoughtful, intelligent, deeply-felt book’

Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times

Gordon infuses literary history with electrifying discoveries in this symbiotic portrait of radical mother-daughter writers who indelibly changed society and the arts… Gordon chronicles their harsh, tragic, and courageous lives in alternating chapters that are as emotionally incisive as they are finely particularized in their astute renderings of tumultuous settings and dire predicaments... She delivers overdue justice to two… thinkers and writers who risked everything to protest in word and deed crimes and discrimination against women.

*Starred* Booklist

[A] unique double biography... An excellent and poignant book whose heroines breathe in its pages.

David Aaronovitch, The Times

An innovative dual biography that foregrounds the writing of two women who disregarded the moral codes of their eras and shaped their own destinies. Gordon’s parallel mapping of their lives reveals fascinating similarities in the ways writing sustained, and sometimes saved, them both.

Financial Times

Wollstonecraft and Shelley were extraordinary women who led sensational lives. They were Romantic revolutionaries… retelling their story cannot fail to captivate and provoke.

Spectator

Full of enriching paradox… Charlotte Gordon has managed to produce that rare thing, a work of genuinely popular history... It works beautifully.

Melissa Benn, New Statesman

An exceptional achievement

Michael Morpugo, Daily Telegraph

Charlotte Gordon’s fascinating double biography [of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley]… is a skilful interweaving of the two stories… [It] presents a compelling comparison of their struggles, adventures, romantic entanglements and, ultimately, the uniquely personal philosophies that helped to shape the writings for which they are best remembered…’

Hallie Rubenhold, BBC History Magazine

Fascinating... The accumulated detail of places, characters and historical events gives these two lives a hallucinatory realism.

Lynn Roberts, Books of the Year, Tablet

Unique... Marvellous, passionate stuff.

David Aaronovitch, Books of the Year, Times

A mother and her daughter, who changed not only the way we think, but the way we are … Skilfully entwining the story of two generations that spanned a century, Gordon’s book enables readers to compare the different ways in which these two remarkable people confronted their tragically difficult destinies.

Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times, Paperback of the Week

Read and be seriously inspired.

Stylist