Mary Shelley (1797 - 1851) was an English novelist, short-story writer, essayist and editor, best known for Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). [1] Written when she was a teenager and published anonymously, the novel is widely considered a founding work of science fiction. [2] The daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, she also produced later novels including The Last Man and edited the poetry of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Family and early life
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in Somers Town, London, on 30 August 1797. Her mother, the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, died of complications of childbirth eleven days later; her father was the political philosopher William Godwin. She received no formal schooling but had the run of her father's library and grew up among the writers and radicals who visited the household. [1]
In 1814, at sixteen, she began a relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a follower of her father who was then already married, and the two left for the Continent. The years that followed were marked by financial insecurity, social ostracism and repeated bereavement, including the deaths of three of her children in infancy.
Frankenstein
In the summer of 1816 the couple stayed near Lake Geneva alongside Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. Confined indoors by the cold, wet weather of that year, the group agreed to each write a ghost story. Mary's contribution grew into a full novel about Victor Frankenstein, a student of natural philosophy who assembles and animates a living creature and then abandons it. [2]
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in three volumes in 1818, with a preface by Percy Shelley that led some early readers to attribute the book to him. Her authorship was acknowledged in the 1823 edition, and she issued a substantially revised version with a new introduction in 1831. The novel's framing of scientific ambition, responsibility and exclusion has made it one of the most reinterpreted works in English literature. [3]
Later writing
The Shelleys married in 1816 following the death of Percy's first wife, and moved to Italy in 1818. Percy drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822, leaving Mary a widow at twenty-four with one surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley. She returned to England the following year and supported herself by writing. [1]
Her later works include the historical novel Valperga (1823), the apocalyptic The Last Man (1826), in which a plague destroys humanity, and the novels Perkin Warbeck, Lodore and Falkner. She also wrote short fiction, travel books including Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844), and biographical essays for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia.
She devoted considerable effort to editing and annotating Percy Shelley's poetry and prose, work that shaped his posthumous reputation, although her editorial framing has itself become a subject of scholarly debate.
Death and legacy
Mary Shelley died at her home in Chester Square, London, on 1 February 1851, at the age of fifty-three; her physicians attributed her death to a brain tumour. She was buried at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, alongside her parents' remains. [1]
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries she was read primarily as the author of a single novel and as Percy Shelley's editor. Scholarship since the 1970s has recovered the full range of her fiction, essays and political thought. Frankenstein has been adapted for stage and screen more often than almost any other novel, and she was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. [2]
