In 1980, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literary theorist Barbara
Johnson wrote an essay on Mary Shelley for a colloquium on the writings
of Jacques Derrida. The essay marked the beginning of Johnson's lifelong
interest in Shelley as well as her first foray into the field of
"women's studies," one of whose commitments was the rediscovery and
analysis of works by women writers previously excluded from the academic
canon. Indeed, the last book Johnson completed before her death was
Mary Shelley and Her Circle, published here for the first time.
Shelley was thus the subject for Johnson's beginning in feminist
criticism and also for her end.
It is surprising to recall that when Johnson wrote her essay, only two
of Shelley's novels were in print, critics and scholars having mostly
dismissed her writing as inferior and her career as a side effect of her
famous husband's. Inspired by groundbreaking feminist scholarship of the
seventies, Johnson came to pen yet more essays on Shelley over the
course of a brilliant but tragically foreshortened career. So much of
what we know and think about Mary Shelley today is due to her and a
handful of scholars working just decades ago.
In this volume, Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman have united all of
Johnson's published and unpublished work on Shelley alongside their own
new, insightful pieces of criticism and those of two other peers and
fellow pioneers in feminist theory, Mary Wilson Carpenter and Cathy
Caruth. The book thus evolves as a conversation amongst key scholars of
shared intellectual inclinations while closing the circle on Johnson's
life and her own fascination with the life and circle of another woman
writer, who, of course, also happened to be the daughter of a founder of
modern feminism.
