Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Biography

English Romantic novelist, biographer and editor, best known as the writer of FRANKENSTEIN, OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS (1818). Shelley was 21 when the book was published. The story deals with an ambitious young scientist. He creates life but then rejects his creation, a monster.

Mary Shelley was born in London. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in childbirth, was one of the first feminists. Her father was the writer and political journalist William Godwin, who became famous with his work An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin had revolutionary attitudes to most social institutions, including marriage. Among his other books is Things as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794).

In her childhood Mary Shelley was left to educate herself amongst her father's intellectual circle. She published her first poem at the age of ten. At the age of 16 she ran away to France and Switzerland with the poet Percy Shelley. They married in 1816 after Shelley's first wife had committed suicide by drowning. Their first child, a daughter, died in Venice, Italy, a few years later. In HISTORY OF SIX WEEKS TOUR (1817) the Shelleys jointly recorded their life. Thereafter they returned to England and Mary gave birth to a son, William.

The story of Frankenstein started on summer in 1816 when Mary joined with Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont near Geneva Lord Byron. She took a challenge set by Byron and Shelley to write the most frightening ghost story. The idea came to her in a dream.

The first edition of book had an unsigned preface by Percy Shelley. Many thought that it is also his novel, disbelieving that only 19-year-old woman could write such horror story. However, when the book was published in 1818, it became a huge success.

In 1818 the Shelleys left England for Italy, where they remained until Shelley's death - he drowned in 1822 in the Bay of Spezia near Livorno. In 1819 Mary suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of William - she had also lost a daughter the previous year. In 1822 she had a dangerous miscarriage. Of their children only one, Percy Florence, survived infancy. In 1823 she returned with her son to England, determined not to-re-marry. She devoted herself to his welfare and education and continued her career as a professional writer.

None of Shelley's works published for over 30 matched the power of her first legendary novel. Her later works include LODORE (1835) and FAULKNER (1937), both romantic pot-boilers, and unfinished MATHILDE (1819, published 1959), which draws on her relations with Godwin and Shelley. VALPERGA (1823) is a romance set in the 14th-century, and THE LAST MAN (1826) depicts the end of human civilization, set in the 21st century.

Shelley gave up writing long fiction when realism started to gain popularity, exemplified in the works of Charles Dickens. She wrote a numerous short stories for popular periodicals, particularly The Keepsaker, produced several volumes of Lives for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia, and the first authorative edition of Shelley's poems (1839, 4 vols.). Shelley's well-received travelogue RAMBLES IN GERMANY AND ITALY appeared in 1844.