Part of the 2026 community-wide Winter Read of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Join your local libraries throughout February for films, speakers, and discussions.

Charlotte Gordon’s groundbreaking dual biography, “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley,” brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. The book was awarded the National Book Critics Circle in biography in 2015.

Wollstonecraft died in 1797, ten days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary. Five years earlier, she had won fame by proclaiming the rights of women in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Her daughter Mary was to follow a similarly audacious path, publishing “Frankenstein” at age nineteen. Brave, passionate, and visionary, both women broke almost every rule there was to break. They had scandalous love affairs, bore children out of wedlock and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history.

Join The Community Library as we kick off the 2026 Winter Read of “Frankenstein” and as Charlotte Gordon takes us on a vivid journey across Revolutionary France and Victorian England, from the seaports of Italy to the highlands of Scotland. Gordon will introduce us to the defiant, creative lives of this daring mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid conventions of their era.