8vo. 396pp. With a half-title. Contemporary burgundy cloth, stamped in gilt and blind. Lightly rubbed, cocked, lower joint split, chipping to head and foot of sunned spine. Marbled endpapers, armorial bookplate of Glenbarr to FEP, partially clipped contemporary inked ownership inscription to head of half-title. William St Clair's copy, with his distinctive pencilled ownership inscription and manuscript notes to FEP: 'Contemporary pirate not recorded in Lyle. This must be an extremely rare volume: I have never heard tell of it. Resembles early English publisher's cloth but presumably the book has been rebound since the ownership inscription is clipped'.

The first continental edition, issued as a part of Brussels-based publisher A. Wahlen's Modern British Authors series, of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's (1797-1851) fifth and penultimate novel; a romance that differs from her earlier work in its shift away from the supernatural or historical to a more contemporary setting to critique the limitations of the conventional Victorian class system. The novel's modern editor, Lisa Vargo (Lodore, 1997, Introduction p.18-19), has noted the text's engagement with the education and social role of women, suggesting that it dissects a patriarchal culture that pressured women into dependence on men. In the view of critic Betty T. Bennett (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction, 1998): 'the novel proposes egalitarian educational paradigms for women and men, which would bring social justice as well as the spiritual and intellectual means by which to meet the challenges life invariably brings'. The Literary Gazette (No. 949, 1835) heaped praise upon the novel, dubbing Shelley 'one of the most original of our modern writers'.

William St Clair (1937-2021), British scholar and senior civil servant, notable as the author of The Godwins and the Shelleys, The Biography of a Family (1989) and The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004).