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Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (UK: /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/; née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who is best known for writing the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction.[2] She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.

"Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin" redirects here. For her mother, see Mary Wollstonecraft. For other uses, see Mary Shelley (disambiguation).

Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
(1797-08-30)30 August 1797
London, England

1 February 1851(1851-02-01) (aged 53)
London, England

Writer

(m. 1816; died 1822)

4, including Percy Florence

Mary's mother died 11 days after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Mary came to have a troubled relationship.[3][4]


In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.


In 1816, the couple and Mary's stepsister famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at the age of 53.


Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846), support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

(1817)

History of a Six Weeks' Tour

(1818)

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

(1819)

Mathilda

(1823)

Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca

Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)

(1826)

The Last Man

(1830)

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck

(1835)

Lodore

(1837)

Falkner

The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839)

Contributions to (1835–39), part of Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia

Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men

in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844)

Rambles in Germany and Italy

Collections of Mary Shelley's papers are housed in Lord Abinger's Shelley Collection on deposit at the Bodleian Library, the New York Public Library (particularly The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle), the Huntington Library, the British Library, and in the John Murray Collection.

Mary Shelley (2017 film)

Godwin–Shelley family tree

Map of 1814 and 1816 European journeys

Map of 1840s European journeys

Goulding, Christopher. "The Real Doctor Frankenstein?" Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The Royal Society of Medicine, May 2002.

"Out of Control" (review of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, edited by David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert, MIT Press, 277 pp.; and Mary Shelley, The New Annotated Frankenstein, edited and with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger, Liveright, 352 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 38, 40–41.

Richard Holmes

(2016). Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley, Random House.

Gordon, Charlotte

at Standard Ebooks

Works by Mary Shelley in eBook form

at Project Gutenberg

Works by Mary Shelley

at Internet Archive

Works by or about Mary Shelley

at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Works by Mary Shelley

– part of Romantic Circles

Mary Shelley chronology and bibliography

. UK National Archives.

"Archival material relating to Mary Shelley"

held by the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley manuscript material, 1815–1850

at the British Library

Mary Shelley

at IMDb

Mary Shelley

at Open Library

Works by Mary Shelley

. Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

"Mary W. Shelley biography"

Archived 10 September 2018 at the Wayback Machine

Exhibits relating to Mary Shelley at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford