Few literary figures have been so intent as the Shelleys were on examining, with the impassioned precision specific to the very young, the differences between themselves and others. Few writers, furthermore, have so enthusiastically rearranged their circumstances so that they could translate those differences into the pages of their books and the texture of their lives. For those incurable Romantics, comparison was everything; they were obsessed by associations, by doubles, by the distance between souls and by the faith that art and love could reduce that distance. It is therefore unthinkable that Mary Shelley’s identity could be understood outside the context of her relationships to the hard-driving personalities of her father, her husband, and other figures in the Shelley circle; without those comparisons, her story is hugely diminished. Curiously, after taking care to describe the details of Mary Shelley’s relationships, Muriel Spark goes on in this newly revised biography to try to separate Mary’s thought from the influences of those vivid personalities with which she surrounded herself. The result is an extremely uneven portrait.

Muriel Spark is known primarily for her novels, but she began her writing career with an earlier version of the present biography entitled Child of Light, published in England in 1951. One wonders whether the figure of Mary Shelley interested Muriel Spark sufficiently to cause her to make the Romantic heroine’s spirit a presence in her novels. But a reading of those novels—from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to The Abbess of