Also published as The Beautiful Widow, Mary Shelley’s penultimate novel explores the web of relationships between three women bound together by the exacting Lord Lodore: Cornelia, Lodore’s estranged wife, ruled by her mother and the norms of aristocratic society; Ethel, his daughter, raised in the wilderness of Illinois and utterly reliant on her father; and finally, the independent and highly educated Fanny Derham, the daughter of Lodore’s childhood friend. Long considered the most Austen-like and socially oriented of Mary Shelley’s novels, Lodore is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand this brilliant feminist writer.
