The Life of Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in 1791 in London. She is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Goodwin. Wollstonecraft was a radical feminist writer, and Goodwin was a writer as well as a philosopher. It was said that this couple's combined intellect was dangerous to society; however, days after Mary's birth, Wollstonecraft died due to complications from the pregnancy. Mary spent a lot of time visiting her mother's grave when she was growing up. Her father taught her how to spell her mother's name by having her trace the letters on the headstone with her fingers, an interesting yet morbid way to teach a seven year old how to spell. Goodwin raised Mary by himself for the early part of her life. When Mary was four, he married Mary Jane Clairmont, who also had children from a previous marriage. Mary never fully accepted the stepfamily; she always felt like an outsider. Many of her feelings of loneliness and longing to know her mother are issues that are prevalent in the novel Frankenstein. These issues are analogous to the search that the monster had for his creator.
During Mary's teenage years, Goodwin owned a publishing company, so the Goodwin household was filled with famous authors and intellectuals. Coleridge was known to visit the house often. On one occasion he read the recently completed The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner in their living room, while Mary stayed up past her bedtime to listen. Percy Bysshe Shelley also came to the house on a regular basis to seek knowledge from Goodwin, who was one of his mentors. Mary grew fond of him, and they began their courtship when she was only fifteen and he was twenty. When Mary was sixteen she ran off to Europe with Percy, a...
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... it has on the horror/science fiction writers today.
Works Cited and Consulted
1. Caprio, Terry. ( Accessed 23 Oct 00) http://loki.stockton.edu/~stk13818/mary.htm
2. "Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus Home." U.S. National Library of Medicine. (Last Mod 28 Jan 00) ( Accessed 12 Oct 00) http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frank_birth.html
3. Hamberg, Cynthia. "My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." ( Last Mod/1999/2000(c)). Yahoo. ( Accessed 15 Oct 00).http://srd.yahoo.com/drst/27147033/*http://home-1.worldonline.nl/~hamberg/
4. "Mary Shelley and Frankenstein." ( Last Mod 11 Jan 00). (Accessed 10 Oct 00). http://www.desert-fairy.com/life.shtml
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in Frankenstein: Contexts, nineteenth century responses, criticism. By Mary Shelley. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. Norton Critical Edition.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley - Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York, New York: Routledge, Chapman, & Hall, Inc., 1989. p 136.
Mary Shelley, the author of the novel Frankenstein, was born on August 30th 1797. He father, William Godwin, was a philosopher, and her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, who is still well known for being an author and one of the first feminists. But unfortunately Mary Shelley’s mother died of puerperal fever ten days after giving birth to her daughter. As Mary’s father was a philosopher, Mary had to listen to many intellectual talks. Mary was strongly impressed by the brilliant talks she listened to since she was young as she was surrounded by famous writers and philosophers. The intellectual environment in which she lived stimulated her Romantic sensibility and the political revolutionary ideas of the time. Later on in life Mary married a man named Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy was a poet and a member of the Romantic Movement. But unfortunately Mary had to elope with Shelley at the age of 16 as he was...
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Edited with an Introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Penguin books, 1992
Works Cited Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maurice Hindle. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Edited by: D.L. Macdonald & Kathleen Scherf. Broadview Editions. 3rd Edition. June 20, 2012
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. The 1818 Text. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Edited by: D.L. Macdonald & Kathleen Scherf. Broadview Editions. 3rd Edition. June 20, 2012
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Edited with an Introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Penguin books, 1992
Mary Shelley was born 1797 in London, to her influential father William Godwin, and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft who died giving birth to her. Growing up Mary was educated and tutored by her father, and because of his reputation she was surrounded by intellectuals during the Industrial Revolution. At the age of sixteen, Mary ran away to live with her future husband Percy Shelley, a free thinker that her father did not approve of. Her marriage with Percy ultimately leads to turmoil in Shelly’s relationship with her father. Mary spent the summer of 1816 in a Geneva with her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. The group decided to write a ghost story which eventually led to Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein: The modern Prometheus. The novel would be defined a...
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 1999.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Edited with an Introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Penguin books, 1992