This collection presents the hitherto unpublished last work by deceased literary scholar Barbara Johnson, A Life with Mary Shelley, alongside Johnson's earlier landmark essays on Shelley and incisive new commentary on Johnson's engagement with Shelley by Butler, Felman, Caruth, and Carpenter.

Barbara Johnson was Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University.Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.Shoshana Felman is Robert Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University.

"The publication, for the first time in this volume, of Barbara Johnson's last book Mary Shelley and Her Circle (2009) will be of interest to feminist theorists and literary critics alike Completed only a few weeks before Johnson's death, Mary Shelley and Her Circle is, perhaps one should say above all, a measure of the value of intellectual labor: Johnson's concise, yet pithy and unfailingly rewarding style is here refined in the relentless temporality of terminal illness."