Fanny grows up as an outsider, often made to feel like a burden on the household despite her housework and peacemaking efforts. When the two other girls in the family run away with a seductive neighbor, Fanny’s loyalties are torn between her own yearning for independence and a longing for acceptance from all the family factions.

Is this Fanny Price in Mansfield Park? Meet the little-known but very real Fanny Wollstonecraft, daughter of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and older half-sister to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein and wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Fanny coped with her stepmother’s unrelenting criticism, sought inclusion with her half- and stepsisters, and craved love from her stepfather William Godwin in a household where a stepsister noted, “If you cannot write an epic poem, or a novel that by its originality knocks all other novels on the head, you are a despicable creature not worth acknowledging.” Fanny’s biography is handled with the tender sensitivity she never received during her short life.

“In the world of pragmatic compromise envisaged by Jane Austen at about the same time, enthusiastic Harriet [Westbrook, Shelley's first wife] as Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility should have lived to find a kinder man, while compassionate Fanny could and should have gained the rewards earned by her namesake Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Instead both encountered Shelley’s utopian absolutism.”

While Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle is not about Jane Austen, this scholarly biography provides a thoughtful examination of the literary and philosophical influences of Jane’s time period, carefully researched and adorned with details. But a penchant for footnotes isn’t necessary to enjoy this book: it’s a fascinating story about the young women in the Wollstonecraft-Godwin household and how their upbringing combined with Shelley’s passionate influence to send the small family’s dynamics into turmoil. The “aristocracy of genius” encouraged by Godwin and Shelley was not without tragic results – leading to a poignant tale of love and death straight out of Romanticism in its own right.