Death and the Visitors (A Mary Shelley Mystery)
Mary’s late mother is philosopher and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. Young Mary lives in London in the household of her father William Godwin, a philosopher, and his stepdaughter Jane. William is deeply in debt and desperate to find a way out of his financial problems. The year is 1814, and many foreign diplomats are arriving in London ahead of the Congress of Vienna meetings. Minor European royalty and statesmen visit the Godwin household. One of these, Pavel Naryshkin, has promised one thousand guineas worth of diamonds towards William Godwin’s Juvenile Library project. However, Pavel Naryshkin is found drowned in the Thames, and the jewels are missing. Mary and Jane, together with Mary’s admirer, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, try to find the person responsible for the drowning and the disappearance of the jewels.
This is the second of Heather Redmond’s Mary Shelley Mysteries. She has a well-developed sense of the customs and conduct of the time – the contempt for, but reliance on, servants; the man of the house routinely talking over conversations and ignoring the opinions of his wife and daughters. Adding to the literary and philosophical background is the very human, uncomfortable atmosphere of the Godwin household with Mary’s stepmother finding a multitude of small verbal and physical abuses to emphasize the point that her presence is unwelcome. The author’s intensive and extensive knowledge of the literary life of London in the early 19th century makes this novel an important contribution to our understanding of this influential period in our literary history.
