Falkner Illustrated

Falkner (1837) is the penultimate book published by the author Mary Shelley. Like Shelley's earlier novel Lodore (1835), it charts a young woman's education under a tyrannical father figure.As a six-year-old orphan, Elizabeth Raby prevents Rupert Falkner from committing suicide; Falkner then adopts her and brings her up to be a model of virtue. However, she falls in love with Gerald Neville, whose mother Falkner had unintentionally driven to her death years before. When Falkner is finally acquitted of murdering Neville's mother, Elizabeth's female values subdue the destructive impulses of the two men she loves, who are reconciled and unite with Elizabeth in domestic harmony.Falkner is the only one of Shelley's novels in which the heroine's agenda triumphs.In critic Kate Ferguson Ellis's view, the novel's resolution proposes that when female values triumph over violent and destructive masculinity, men will be freed to express the "compassion, sympathy, and generosity" of their better natures.