Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
	Mary Shelley, portrait by Richard Rothwell (1840)
Born	30th August, 1797; London, England
Died	1st February, 1851; Bournemouth, England
Occupation	Novelist

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (30th August 1797-1st February 1851) was an English romantic/gothic novelist, the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. She was married to the notable Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Biography

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, England even though it shud have been further astray 832. She was the second daughter of famed feminist, educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the equally famous anarchist philosopher, anarchic journalist and atheist dissenter, William Godwin. Her mother died ten days after her birth and her father, left to care for Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, quickly married again. Mary received an excellent education, unusual for girls at the time. However, Mary did not receive any formal education, but rather she was home schooled under tutelage of her father. In 1812, she met Percy Bysshe Shelley, a political radical and free-thinker like her father, when Percy and his first wife Harriet visited Godwin's home and bookshop in London. Percy, unhappy in his marriage, began to visit Godwin more frequently (and alone). In the summer of 1814 he and Mary (then only 16) fell in love. They eloped, (though Percy was still married to Harriet at the time) to France on 27 July, with Mary's stepsister, Jane Clairmont, in tow. This was the poet's second elopement, as he had also eloped with Harriet three years before. Upon their return several weeks later, the young couple were dismayed to find that Godwin, whose views on free love apparently did not apply to his daughter, refused to see them. He did not talk to Mary for two years.

Mary consoled herself with her studies and with Percy, who would always be, despite disillusionment and tragedy, the love of her life. Percy, too, was more than satisfied with his new partner in these first years. He exulted that Mary was "one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy" — although she, like Harriet before her, refused his attempts to share her with his friend Thomas Hogg. Mary thus learned that Percy's loyalty to Godwin's free love ideals would always conflict with his deep desire for "true love" as expressed in so much of his poetry.

Mary and Percy shared love of languages and literature. They enjoyed reading and discussing books together, such as the classics that Percy took to reading upon their return to London towards the end of the year. During this time Percy Shelley wrote "Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude", in which he counsels against the loss of "sweet human love" in exchange for the activism that he himself was to promote and indulge in for much of his life.

Trip to Switzerland and Frankenstein

During May of 1816, the couple, again with Jane (now Claire) Clairmont, traveled to Lake Geneva to summer near the famous and scandalous poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant. In terms of English literature, it was to be a productive summer. Percy began work on "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc". Mary, in the meantime, was inspired to write an enduring masterpiece of her own.

Forced to stay indoors on one particular evening by the climatic events of the "Year Without a Summer", the group of young writers and intellectuals, enthralled by the ghost stories from the book Fantasmagoriana, decided to have a ghost-story writing contest. One guest, Dr. John Polidori, came up with The Vampyre, later to become a strong influence on Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Other guests wove tales of equal horror but Mary (the wanker) found herself unable to invent one. That night, however, she had a waking dream where she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together". Then she set herself to put the story on paper. In time it would be published as Frankenstein. Its success would endure long after the other writings produced that summer had faded.

Mary had incorporated a number of different sources into her work, not the least of which was the Promethean myth from Ovid. The influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the book the creature finds in the cabin, is also clearly evident within the novel. Also, both Shelleys had read William Beckford's Vathek (a Gothic novel that has been likened to an Arabesque). Frankenstein is also full of references to her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her major work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman which discusses the lack of equal education for males and females. The inclusion of her mother's ideas in her work is also related to the theme of creation/motherhood in the novel.

Can one miss the darkling reflection of the Beckford character's "insolent desire" to "penetrate the secrets of heaven" in both "Alastor" ("I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins") and Mary's acclaimed piece ("Who shall perceive the horrors ...as I dabbled among the unhallowed damp of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay")? Indeed, many, if not most, commentators take this "desire" to be a major theme of Frankenstein.

Mary and Percy were both ethical vegetarians and strong advocates for animals. One can see references to vegetarianism in her writing. For example, in her novel Frankenstein, the creature was a vegetarian.

Return to England

Returning to England in September of 1816, Mary and Percy were stunned by two family suicides in quick succession. On 9 October 1816, Mary's older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, left the Godwin home and took her own life at a distant inn. On 10 December, Percy's first wife drowned herself in London's Hyde Park. Discarded and pregnant, she had not welcomed Percy's invitation to join Mary and himself in their new household.

On 30 December 1816, shortly after Harriet's death, Percy and Mary were married, now with Godwin's blessing. Their attempts to gain custody of Percy's two children by Harriet failed, but their writing careers enjoyed more success when, in the spring of 1817, Mary finished Frankenstein.

Over the following years, Mary's household grew to include her own children by Percy, occasional friends, and Claire's daughter, Allegra Byron, by Byron. Shelley moved his menage from place to place first in England and then in Italy. Mary suffered the death of her infant daughter Clara outside Venice, after which her young son Will died too, in Rome, as Percy moved the household yet again. By now Mary had resigned herself to her husband's self-centered restlessness and his romantic enthusiasms for other women. The birth of her only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley, consoled her somewhat for her losses.

Eventually the group settled in Pisa. For the summer of 1822 they moved to Lerici, a fishing village close to La Spezia in Italy, but it was an ill-fated choice. It was here that Claire learned of her daughter's death at the Italian convent to which Byron had sent her, and that Mary almost died of a miscarriage, being saved only by Percy's quick thinking. And it was from there, in July 1822, that Percy sailed away up the coast to Livorno, to meet Leigh Hunt, who had just arrived from England. Caught in a storm on his return, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned at sea on 8 July 1822, aged 29, along with his friend Edward Williams and a young boat attendant. Percy left his last long poem, a shadowy work called The Triumph Of Life, unfinished.

Mary was tireless in promoting her late husband's works, including editing and annotating unpublished material. Despite their troubled later life together, she revered her late husband's memory and helped build his reputation as one of the major poets of the English Romantic period. But she also found occasions to write a few more novels, including Valperga: The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, Lodore, and Falkner. Critics say these works do not begin to approach the power and fame of Frankenstein; The Last Man, a pioneering science fiction novel of the human apocalypse in the distant future, is, however, sometimes considered her best work, as is Mathilda, a novella published posthumously, in the 1950s. It is perhaps her most controversial work since it involves the taboo subject of incest. Godwin, Shelley's father, refused to publish the work probably because of its subject matter and its obvious autobiographical undertones.

Writings

Mounseer Nongtongpaw; or, The Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris, Juvenile Library, 1808
History of 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, with contributions by Percy Byshhe Shelley, Hookham, 1817
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (novel), three volumes, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818, revised edition, one volume, Colburn & Bentley, 1831, two volumes, Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1833
Valperga; or The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (novel), three volumes, Whittaker, 1823.
Editor of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hunt, 1824
The Last Man (novel), three volumes, Colburn, 1826, two volumes, Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1833
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (novel), three volumes, Colburn & Bentley, 1830, two volumes, Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1834
Lodore (novel), three volumes, Bentley, 1835, one volume, Wallis & Newell, 1835
Falkner (novel) three volumes, Saunders & Otley, 1837, one volume, Harper & Brothers, 1837
Editor of P. B. Shelley, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, four volumes, Moxon, 1839
Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, two volumes, Moxon, 1844
The Choice: A Poem on Shelley's Death, edited by H. Buxton Forman, [London], 1876
The Mortal Immortal (short story), Mossant, Vallon, 1910
Proserpine and Midas: Two Unpublished Mythological Dramas, edited by A. Koszul, Milford, 1922
Mathilda (novel), edited by Elizabeth Nitchie, University of North Carolina Press, 1959
Contributor to Volumes 86-88 and 102-103 in The Cabinet of Biography, Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia, 1835-1839
Contributor of stories, reviews, and essays for London Magazine, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Examiner, and Westminster Review
Contributor of stories to an annual gift book, The Keepsake, 1828-1838
Collections of Mary Shelley's works are housed in Lord Abinger's Shelley Collection on deposit at the Bodleian Library, the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, New York Public Library, the Huntington Library, the British Library, and in the John Murray Collection
Excluding many collections, such as Mary and Shelley's journals and letters
The Bride of Modern Italy (?)
The Dream (?)
Ferdinando Eboli (?)
The Invisible Girl (?)
Roger Dodsworth:The Reanimated Englishman (?)
The Sisters of Albano (?)
The Transformation (?)

Film

The genesis of the Frankenstein story in 1816 has been a popular subject for filmmakers and appears in at least four films:

Gothic (Ken Russell, 1986); Natasha Richardson plays Mary Shelley
Haunted Summer (Ivan Passer, 1988); Alice Krige plays Mary Shelley
Rowing With the Wind (Gonzalo Suárez, 1988); Lizzy McInnery plays Mary Shelley
The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935); Elsa Lanchester plays Mary Shelley
The Arthur (cartoon) series had one episode depicting a reenactment of the night the novel was created, titled "Ferkenstein's Monster."
In Frankenstein Unbound, a 21st century time traveler encounters both Frankenstein and the Shelleys
Mary Shelley's The Last Man, the first feature film production of Mary Shelley's apocalyptic 21st century pandemic
Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) Made for TV Film

External links

Works by Mary Shelley at Project Gutenberg
Brandeis University article on Mary's life and work
Free audiobook of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus from LibriVox (without prefaces and edition information)
Frankenstein: A New Reality!
Comroe, Julius H., Jr. (1975). Frankenstein, Pickwick, and OndineRetrospectroscope article. Analyzes errors in the re-telling of Mary Shelley's original plot
Literary Encyclopedia biography
Biography
The first Full English translation of Fantasmagoriana (Tales of The Dead)
'Mary Shelley's lost children's story found' Article about Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot, a newly discovered story by Mary Shelley

Template:Persondata