Last year around this time, I read the beginning of a new trilogy featuring a teenaged Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, destined one day to become Mary Shelley, best known as the author of Frankenstein. I exchanged questions and answers with Heather Redmond, the writer responsible for the new series, not long after shifting my blog posts to this site. You can find that interview at https://www.cplesley.com/post/interview-with-heather-redmond.
The second book, Death and the Visitors, came out earlier this week, and this time I had a chance to conduct a New Books Network interview with Heather. It was a great conversation, covering both this series and her previous set of books on Charles Dickens and his wife, so give it a listen.
You can also find more info below. As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.
In this second Regency-era mystery featuring Mary Godwin Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, the sixteen-year-old heroine (still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin at this point in her life) and her stepsister and close lifetime companion, Jane Clairmont, are facing even greater penury and discomfort than in the first book, Death and the Sisters (2023), as a result of their parents’ profligacy and the absence of Mary’s older half-sister, banished to Wales because of her excessive attachment to the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and thus unable to help Jane and Mary with their chores.
The girls live in a run-down house in a disreputable London neighborhood not far from Newgate Prison and the Smithfield meat market, where they spend their days watching their parents’ bookshop. Their father, an illustrious political thinker and writer, doesn’t earn enough to support five children and a wife. As a result, he has fallen into the grip of moneylenders, and creditors show up on his doorstep with some regularity, embarrassing him and his family.
When a group of rich Russians arrives, determined to meet the daughter of the renowned Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary’s father persuades one of them to support the Godwin publishing enterprise with a gift of diamonds. But the day after their scheduled meeting, a body identified as the Russian donor is pulled out of the Thames River. Mary sets out with her sister and Shelley to solve the mystery of the Russian’s murder, hoping to retrieve the diamonds and buy herself and her family some time.
This is the Regency as we have come to know it from the novels of C.S. Harris and Andrea Penrose, among others: opulent on the surface but full of grit and poverty behind the glittering façade. How closely Shelley, Jane, and Mary resemble their historical selves is uncertain, but it’s a rollicking good tale and deserves to be enjoyed on its own terms.
Images: Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and of Maria Naryshkina (1779–1854), the prototype for one of the fictional Russians in Death and the Visitors, by Salvatore Tonci public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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