 Between 1832 and 1839 , Mary Shelley wrote many biographies of notable Italian , Spanish , Portuguese , and French men and a few women for Dionysius Lardner 's Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men . These formed part of Lardner 's Cabinet Cyclopaedia , one of the best of many such series produced in the 1820s and 1830s in response to growing middle @-@ class demand for self @-@ education . Until the republication of these essays in 2002 , their significance within her body of work was not appreciated . In the view of literary scholar Greg Kucich , they reveal Mary Shelley 's " prodigious research across several centuries and in multiple languages " , her gift for biographical narrative , and her interest in the " emerging forms of feminist historiography " . Shelley wrote in a biographical style popularised by the 18th @-@ century critic Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets ( 1779 – 81 ) , combining secondary sources , memoir and anecdote , and authorial evaluation . She records details of each writer 's life and character , quotes their writing in the original as well as in translation , and ends with a critical assessment of their achievement . 
