Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Born: Aug. 30, 1797, London,
Eng. Died: Feb. 1, 1851, London, English Romantic novelist best known as the
author of Frankenstein.
She was the only daughter of William
Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She met the young poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley in the spring of 1814 and eloped with him to France in July of that
year. The couple were married in 1816, after Shelley's first wife had
committed suicide. Mary Shelley apparently came as near as any woman could to
meeting Percy Shelley's requirements for his life's partner: "one who can
feel poetry and understand philosophy." After her husband's death in
1822, she returned to England and devoted herself to publicizing Shelley's
writings and to educating their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.
She published her late husband's Posthumous Poems (1824), and she also edited
his Poetical Works (1839), with long and invaluable notes, and his prose
works. Her Journal is a rich source of Shelley biography, and her letters are
an indispensable adjunct.
Mary Shelley's best-known novel is Frankenstein,
or The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which she narrates the dreadful
consequences that arise after a scientist has artificially created a human
being. The man-made monster in this novel inspired a similar creature in
several famous American horror films of the 1930s. Mary Shelley wrote several
other novels, such as Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830),
Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837), but The Last Man (1826), an account of the
future destruction of the human race by a plague, is still ranked as her best
novel. Her travel book History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817) recounts the
continental tour she and Shelley took in 1814 following their elopement and
then recounts their summer near Geneva in 1816.
F.L. Jones edited her letters (1944)
and her journal (1947).
PICTURE: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, detail of an oil
painting by R. Rothwell, first exhibited 1840; in the National Portrait
Gallery, London By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
