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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Shelley lived a literary life. Her father encouraged her to learn to write by composing letters, and her favorite occupation as a child was writing stories. Unfortunately, all of Mary's juvenilia were lost when she ran off with Percy in 1814, and none of her surviving manuscripts can be definitively dated before that year. Her first published work is often thought to have been Mounseer Nongtongpaw, comic verses written for Godwin's Juvenile Library when she was ten and a half; however, the poem is attributed to another writer in the most recent authoritative collection of her works. Percy Shelley enthusiastically encouraged Mary Shelley's writing: "My husband was, from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enroll myself on the page of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary reputation."
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. 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 feminist activist Mary Wollstonecraft.
Shelley's mother died less than a month 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 Shelley came to have a troubled relationship.
In 1814, Shelley 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, Shelley 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 her 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 age 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.
Books by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus
A precursor to gothic literature and science fiction genres, Frankenstein is a novel fuming with imagination as it depicts a well known horror story. Shelly’s gothic fiction is written in epistolary form as a means of correspondence between the faile...
The Last Man
The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, which was first published in 1826. The book describes a future Earth at the time of the late 21st century, ravaged by a new pandemic of a mysterious disease which quickl...
Mathilda
Mathilda, or Matilda, is the second long work of fiction of Mary Shelley, written between August 1819 and February 1820 and first published posthumously in 1959. It deals with common Romantic themes of incest and suicide. The narrative deals with a f...
Lodore
The central story follows the fortunes of the wife and daughter of the title character, Lord Lodore, who is killed in a duel at the end of the first volume, leaving a trail of legal, financial, and familial obstacles for the two "heroines" to negotia...
Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by the British author Mary Shelley. Shelley wrote the novel when she was 18 years old. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818, and this audiobook is read from that text...
Frankenstein oder der moderne Prometheus
Frankenstein oder Der moderne Prometheus ... erzählt die Geschichte des jungen Schweizers Viktor Frankenstein, der an der damals berühmten Universität Ingolstadt einen künstlichen Menschen erschafft, und später von seiner Kreatur verfolgt wird, welc...
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (Edition 1831)
A mentally unstable genius, Victor Frankenstein, inspired by the dreams of ancient alchemists and empowered by modern science, creates a humanoid but fails to nurture and educate it after it comes to life. It wanders alone into a hostile world, where...
History of a Six Weeks' Tour
Full titled History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni, this small journal was a travel narrative kept by the E...
Frankenstein (El Moderno Prometeo)
Ubicada en la Europa del siglo XVIII y en plena efervescencia científica, el capitán de un barco ballenero escribe a su hermana Margaret su encuentro con el joven estudiante de filosofía natural Víctor Frankenstein. Dicho hombre ha descubierto el sec...
Falkner
Falkner is the last novel by Mary Shelley, best known as the author of Frankenstein and The Last Man. It tells the impossible love story between Elizabeth Raby and Gerald Neville. She is an orphan, raised by a tyrannical father figure. The man who ra...
Last Man, Volume I
The Last Man is an early post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, which was first published in 1826. The three volume book tells of a future world that has been ravaged by a plague. Volume One describes the future world and family of L...
Tales and Stories
While Mary Shelley will most likely always be known for her enduring classic of mad science Frankenstein, this collection intends to show the sheer breath and quality of her writing beyond the creation for which she is most known. Many of these stori...