Betty T. Bennett

Betty T. Bennett ( born 1935 in Brooklyn, † 2006) was an American literary scholar and dean of the American University. Betty B. Bennett was born in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at Brooklyn College and graduated magna cum laude. In 1962, she obtained a Master and 1970, she earned her doctorate in English and American literature at New York University from 1979 to 1985, she taught at the Pratt Institute.

Betty T. Bennett has become known primarily as an expert of the work and life of Mary Shelley and her circle. At Bennetts particularly outstanding work was the publication of the three volumes The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley from 1980 to 1988. Criticising occasion of the publication of the last volume, Brian Aldiss called it a milestone in the literature. The three volumes contain 1,300 letters, 500 of which have never been published before. The last few years before her death, Betty Bennett was working on a biography of Mary Shelley.

Work (selection)

• British was poetry in the age of romanticism, 1793-1815 (1976 )
• The Evidence of the imagination: studies of interactions in between life and art in English romantic literature (1978 )
• The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1980-1988)
• The Mary Shelley reader: Containing Frankenstein, Mathilda, tales and stories, essays and reviews, and letters (1990 )
• Mary Diana Dods, a gentleman and a scholar (1991 )
• Mythological dramas: Proserpine and Midas / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1992 )
• Selected letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1995 )
• Shelley: poet and legislator of the world (1996 )
• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: an introduction (1998)
• Lives of the great romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley by Their contemporaries (1999)
• Mary Shelley in her times (2000)