Mary Shelley's short children's tale, Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot, remained undiscovered for 200 years. It's a charming enough story about a stolen child who is eventually reunited with his parents, but taken on its own merits, Maurice is far more likely to appeal to Shelley scholars than to modern-day children. Fortunately, its publishers recognize this and have sensibly included a fascinating introduction by Claire Tomalin--indeed, the introduction is longer than the story itself. In it, Tomalin describes the circumstances under which the manuscript was rediscovered (in a trunk, in a palazzo, in Tuscany) and its authenticity verified:

We were greeted by Andrea and Cristina Dazzi, and offered coffee. Then the manuscript of Maurice was brought out and laid in front of me on the table: an alarming moment because coffee and manuscripts must not occupy the same space. Once we had separated them, I found Maurice exactly as Cristina Dazzi had described it.

Tomalin then goes on to relate the unhappy life of its author from her impulsive elopement to the continent with the then-married Percy Shelley through the early deaths of three of her children and the unorthodox relationship between herself, her husband, and her sister--who may also have been Percy Shelley's lover. So riveting is the preface to Shelley's short story, in fact, that a more accurate title might have been An Introduction by Claire Tomalin with a Long-Lost Tale by Mary Shelley.

Included in this slim volume are two versions of Maurice; one is "corrected and slightly modernized for ease of reading." The other is a facsimile of the original with Shelley's lineation, pagination, spelling, corrections. Read in the context of the author's own unhappy experience of losing children, her fable of a child regained resonates poignantly. This is one lost tale we're glad was found. --Alix Wilber --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover �dition.

From Publishers Weekly

The discovery last year of a long-lost, hitherto unpublished story by Mary Shelley?author of Frankenstein, feminist and wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley?raises expectations. A morality tale for children, Maurice was written in 1820 in Italy, where Shelley had fled with her husband and their two small children. Dedicated to Laurette Tighe, a transplanted 11-year-old Irish girl, it's a slight, quaint, creaky, if pleasant enough story full of convoluted sentences. Maurice is a delicate yet resilient boy who runs away from home to escape the beatings of the cruel sailor whom he thinks is his father. After enjoying a loving foster home with a poor old fisherman and his wife, the undaunted boy by chance meets a rich traveler, a retired architect, who, it turns out, is his real parent. Contemporary concerns such as child abuse, broken homes and runaway kids are all present, yet the story seems stilted and full of sentimental touches. In her 60-page introduction, Tomalin, biographer of Jane Austen and Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, offers a fascinating piece of detective work (she went to Italy to meet Tighe's descendants, who had unearthed the manuscript) and shows how this tale of loss and vulnerability mirrors a tangle of tragedies?the deaths of Mary Shelley's three infant children; the suicides of her half-sister and of P.B. Shelley's first wife; the absence of Allegra, daughter of Percy Bysshe's stepsister who was given up to the girl's father, the poet Byron. Tomalin also re-creates the adventures of Laurette's parents, both freethinkers, poets and writers, whose lives saw the Napoleonic Wars and the Romantic movement. The work contains fetching period illustrations, a facsimile of the original manuscript and a witty, tongue-in-cheek poem by Laurette's mother, Margaret King, "Twelve Cogent Reasons for Supposing P.B. Sh-ll-y to be the D-v-l Inc-rn-t-," which is a flattering defense of the radical atheist poet.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover �dition.

Voir toutes les Descriptions du produit

Associer des mots-cl�s � ce produit

(De quoi s'agit-il ?)

Consid�rez votre mot-cl� comme une sorte d'�tiquette d�finissant parfaitement ce produit.
Les mots-cl�s aident les clients � organiser et trouver leurs articles favoris.

L'avis des consommateurs

2 �valuations

5 �toiles:		(0)
4 �toiles:		(2)
3 �toiles:		(0)
2 �toiles:		(0)
1 �toiles:		(0)

�valuation du client type

4.0�toiles sur 5 (2 �valuations de client)

Partagez votre opinion avec les autres clients:

Cr�er votre propre commentaire

Commentaires client les plus utiles

4.0�toiles sur 5 New and exciting, Ao� 5 2002

Par	Shannon Sprague (Purchase, NY United States) - Voir tous mes commentaires

My friend offered me this book to read. It's an amazing work. I read the acutal story and then went back and read the introduction and all the accompanying material. The story itself is cute and definately for children. Then you read the intro and all of a sudden you realize that there was so much more that went into the story than you imagined. I highly reccommend it!

Aidez d'autres clients � trouver les commentaires les plus utiles

Ce commentaire vous a-t-il été utile ?

Signaler ce commentaire

4.0�toiles sur 5 Mary Shelley for kids, Ao� 22 2000

Par Un client

This review is from: Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot: A Tale (Hardcover)

This tale is a far cry from Mary's most acclaimed work, Frankenstein. And why not? It was, after all, written for a little girl, and therefore not intended to house any complexities. It is a simple story, broken into three small parts in the fashion of popular adult stories of Shelley's time, and is a tad on the predictable side. It reads almost like a fairytale, with the stolen child reunited with his parents (who happen to be well-off) by pure chance. Despite the story's lack of surprises, I still found it wonderful to settle back into the familiarity of Shelley's writing style with a new text (as will most who have researched her). "The Fisher's Cot" will also appeal to Mary Shelley fans because of the introduction by Claire Tomalin at the very beginning. Tomalin does a good job of setting the scene that the story was written in so that the casual reader will be able to enjoy not only the actual story, but the story behind it as well. Overall, if you're a Shelley fan you definitely should get this book. If you're not, I politely suggest that you review all your options first.

Aidez d'autres clients � trouver les commentaires les plus utiles

Ce commentaire vous a-t-il été utile ?

Signaler ce commentaire

Partagez votre opinion avec les autres clients: Cr�er votre propre commentaire

› Lire les 2 commentaires des internautes

Listmania!

Cr�er une liste th�matique Listmania!

Cherchez des articles semblables par cat�gorie

Books > Children's Books > Literature > Classics by Age
Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( S ) > Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical
Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

Commentaires

Souhaitez-vous compl�ter ou am�liorer les informations sur ce produit ? Ou faire modifier les images?

Votre historique r�cent

(En savoir plus)

Apr�s avoir visualis� des pages d�taill�es produit ou des r�sultats de recherche, regardez ici pour trouver une fa�on simple de poursuivre votre navigation sur des pages qui vous int�ressent.

› Visitez la Page Que Vous Avez Faite

Apprenez de Nous

Gagnez de l'argent

Permettez-nous de Vous Aider

Conditions g�n�rales de vente | D�claration de confidentialit� � 2008-2010, Amazon.com, Inc. ou ses soci�t�s affili�es.

Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot: A Tale (Paperback)

Les d�tails du produit

Descriptions du produit

From Amazon.com