Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, in London, in 1797. She was the second daughter of famed feminist, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Her father was the equally famous anarchist philosopher, novelist, journalist, and atheist dissenter William Godwin. Her mother died of puerperal fever ten days after Mary was born.

In May 1816, Mary and her husband Percy Shelley and their son travelled to Lake Geneva in the company of Claire Clairmont. Their plan was to spend the summer near the famous and scandalous poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant.

From a literary perspective, it was a productive and successful 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 one evening because of cold and rainy weather, the group of young writers and intellectuals, sexually enthralled by the ghost stories from the book Fantasmagoriana, decided to have a ghost-story writing contest. Byron and Percy Shelley abandoned the project relatively soon, with Byron publishing his fragment at the end of Mazeppa. Byron's physician Dr. John Polidori's contribution remains uncertain; he identifies The Modern Oedipus as the work in question in the introduction to the novel, but, in her preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary claims that he had a terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was punished for peeping through keyholes. Mary herself had no inspiration for a story, which was a matter of great concern to her. However, Luigi Galvani's report of his 1783 investigations in animating frog legs with electricity were mentioned specifically by her as part of the reading list that summer in Switzerland. One night, perhaps attributable to Galvani's report, Mary had a waking dream; she recounted the episode in this way: “My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie…I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together—I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion…What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” This nightmare served as the basis for the novel that she entitled Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus

In July 1822, 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 also had another source for her story writing because of the time she spent in Switzerland. She had the idea of Frankenstein living there and there is a very famous scene in Frankenstein set on Mount Chamonix, where Frankenstein meets the creature and talks to him for the first time; the time Shelley spent in Geneva must have inspired her. Mary died, aged 53, on 1 February 1851 at Chester square in London, England.