Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by Richard Rothwell © National Portrait Gallery, London (provided for educational purposes only)
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist whose work has reached all corners of the globe. She is best-known as the author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
Shelley was born on 30 August 1797 in Somers Town, London.
Shelley was the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin, who described her as ‘singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind’. Her mother, who died days after her birth, was the famous defender of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary grew up with five semi-related siblings in Godwin’s unconventional but intellectually electric household.
At the age of 16, Mary eloped to Italy with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who praised ‘the irresistible wildness & sublimity of her feelings’. Each encouraged the other’s writing, and they married in 1816 after the suicide of Shelley’s wife. They had several children, of whom only one survived.
A ghost-writing contest on a stormy June night in 1816 inspired Frankenstein, often called the first true work of science-fiction. Superficially a Gothic novel, influenced by the experiments of Luigi Galvani, it was concerned with the destructive nature of power when allied to wealth. Shelley was 19 when she wrote the novel.
Familiar to scholars, librarians and the entire literary world, the novel tells the story of Doctor Victor Frankenstein and a creature he creates in an unorthodox scientific experiment. It was an instant wonder and spawned a mythology all of its own that endures to this day.
After Percy Shelley’s death in 1822, Mary Shelley returned to London and pursued a very successful writing career as a novelist, biographer and travel writer. She also edited and promoted her husband’s poems and other writings. She died on 1 February 1851.
SOURCE: British Library People, https://www.bl.uk/people/mary-shelley
