Explores how Mary Shelley's exchanges with her children - in utero, in birth, in life, and in death - infuse her literary creations. Drawing on the archives of feminist scholarship, Rachel Feder theorizes ""elective affinities"", a term she borrows from Goethe to interrogate how the personal attachments of literary critics shape our sense of literary history.

Explores how Mary Shelley's exchanges with her children - in utero, in birth, in life, and in death - infuse her literary creations. Drawing on the archives of feminist scholarship, Rachel Feder theorizes ""elective affinities"", a term she borrows from Goethe to interrogate how the personal attachments of literary critics shape our sense of literary history.