Falkner

Critics have until recently cited Lodore and Falkner as evidence of a conservative retrenchment by Shelley. In 1984, Mary Poovey identified the retreat of Mary Shelley's reformist politics into the "separate sphere" of the domestic.[4] As with Lodore, contemporary critics reviewed the novel as a romance, overlooking its political subtext and noting its moral issues as purely familial. Betty Bennett argues, however, that Falkner is as much concerned with power and political responsibility as Shelley's previous novels.[5] Poovey suggested that Mary Shelley wrote Falkner to resolve her conflicted response to her father's combination of libertarian radicalism and stern insistence on social decorum