Mrs. Shelley

Mary Shelley was born to a mother she would never know, into a household crowded with philosophical books and formidable ideas. Then Percy Shelley arrived as her father’s devoted admirer—and was welcomed into the family’s intimacy.

In late-eighteenth-century England, Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti traces the childhood that shaped the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Mary grows up among her mother’s writings and her father’s conversations, but ideas alone cannot prepare her for the moment when the imaginative young Shelley enters their home, questioning the bounds of marriage and convention. Rossetti asks what such an upbringing made possible—and what it left Mary unprepared to face. When admiration becomes something more, how will Mary choose her way forward?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.