Winter Read Opening: Mary Shelley - Romantic Outlaw In-Person
Part of the 2026 Winter Read of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Join us throughout February for films, speakers, and discussions.
Charlotte Gordon's groundbreaking dual biography, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley, brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. The book was awarded the National Book Critics Circle in biography in 2015.
Wollstonecraft died in 1797, ten days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary. Five years earlier, she had won fame by proclaiming the rights of women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her daughter Mary was to follow a similarly audacious path, publishing Frankenstein at age nineteen. Brave, passionate, and visionary, both women broke almost every rule there was to break. They had scandalous love affairs, bore children out of wedlock and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history.
Join us as we kick off the 2026 Winter Read of Frankenstein as Charlotte Gordon takes us on a vivid journey across Revolutionary France and Victorian England, from the seaports of Italy to the highlands of Scotland. Gordon will introduce us to the defiant, creative lives of this daring mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid conventions of their era.
- Date:
- Thursday, February 5, 2026
- Time:
- 5:30pm - 6:30pm
- Time Zone:
- Mountain Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall
- Campus:
- The Community Library
- Audience:
- Adults
- Categories:
- Lectures & Conversations Winter Read
Charlotte Gordon is also the author of Mary Shelley: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press, Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Story of America's First Poet - a Massachusetts Honor book for non-fiction, and The Woman Who Named God: Abraham's Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths. In 2012, she was selected as the Rose Thering Fellow by the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her new book project on the 19th century women’s movement has won an award from The National Endowment for the Humanities.
Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The Washington Post, The Cambridge Companion to Early American Poetry, and Harvard Magazine. She has also published two books of poetry: When the Grateful Dead Came to St. Louis and Two Girls on a Raft.
A graduate of Harvard College, she received a master's degree in creative writing and a Ph.D. in history and literature from Boston University. She has been a frequent guest on NPR and the CBC, including spots on Weekend Edition and The Current. From 1999-2002 she was Elie Wiesel's teaching assistant at Boston University. Currently, she is the Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Endicott College.