Like Shelley's earlier novel Lodore (1835), it charts a young woman's education under a tyrannical father figure.
[2] 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.
[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 Shelley wrote Falkner to resolve her conflicted response to her father's combination of libertarian radicalism and stern insistence on social decorum.