Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was the author of five novels and numerous works of short fiction, though she is best known for Frankenstein. The daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley was steeped in the progressive ideas of the early-19th-century British Romantic era.

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.