Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley
Life
of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly (Biography):
Before the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the eight years of Franch revolution (1789-1793) was on going. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" was first published. In that same year Percy Bysshe Shelley was born. A year after her book was published, William Godwin published "An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice." Mary's parents were shapers of the Romantic Era sensibility and the revolutionary ideas of the left wing. In 1794, Mary Wollstonecraft bore her first illegitimate child ,Fanny Imlay. In 1797, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft gets married, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born August 30, 1797.
Mary Wollstonecraft dies from an infection caused by improper postdelivery medical treatment soon after Mary Shelley's birth. Godwin taught Mary to read and spell her name by having her trace her mother's inscription on the stone. At the age of sixteen Mary ran away to live with the twenty-one year old Percy Shelley, who was already married to Harriet Westbrook.
She conceived of Frankenstein during on the most famous house parties in literary history when staying at Lake Geneva in Switzerland with Byron and Shelley. She was only nineteen at the time. Her life at the time was series of calamities when she wrote this novel. The worst of these were the suicides of her half-sister, Fanny Imaly, and Shelley's wife, Harriet when she was found drowned with her unidentified lover's premature baby.
In 1816, after the suicides, Mary and Shelley, married at London. Fierce public hostility toward the couple drove them to Italy. They were happy in Italy, but their two young children (Clara Everina and William). Nevertheless, Shelley empowered Mary to live as the most desired: to enjoy intellectual and artistic growth, love, and freedom.
When Mary was only twenty-four Percy drowned, leaving her penniless with a two year old son.
She eventually came to more traditional views of women's dependence and differences, like her mother before her. This not a reflection of her courage and integrity but derived from socialization and the "punishments" placed on her by society.
Mary became an invalid at the age of forty-eight. She died in London from a brain tumor at age of 53. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is buried between her mother and father in St. Peter's Churchyard, Bournemouth. She died in 1851 with poetic timing. The Great Exhibition, which was a showcase of technological progress, was opened. This was the same scientific technology that she had warned against in her most famous book, Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley spent the greater part of the summer of 1816, when she was nineteen, at the Chapuis in Geneva, Switzerland. The weather went from being beautiful and radiant to tempestous. Rains and incredible lightning storms plagued the area, similar to the summer that Mary was born. This incredible change was due to the volcano, Tambora, in Indonesia. The weather, as well as the company (Fanny Imlay,Claire Clairmont, Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician) and the Genevan district, contributed to the genesis of Frankenstein.
On the night of June 16th, Mary and Percy could not return to Chapuis, due to an incredible storm, and spent the night at the Villa Diodati with Byron and John Polidori. The group read aloud a collection of German ghost stories, The Fantasmagoriana. In one of the stories, a group travelers relate to the another supernatural experiences that they ahd experienced. This inspired Lord Byron to challenge the group to write a ghost story.
On the June 22nd, Byron and Shelley were scheduled to take a boat trip around the lake. The night before their departure the group discussed a subject from "whether the principle of life could be discovered and whether scientists could galvanize a corpse of manifactured humaniod." When Mary went to bed, she had a "waking" nightmare.
The next morning Mary realized she had found her story and began writing the lines that open-"It was on a dreary night in November"- She completed the novel in May of 1817 and was published January 1, 1818.
Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-century Writing. New York: Oxford University Press,1987.
Glut, Donald F. The Frankenstein Catalog. London: McFarland & Company, Inc.,1984.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life Her Fiction Her Monsters. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1988.
Riley, Philip J. Frankenstein. New Jersey: Magic Image Filmbooks,1989.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Edited by Johanna M. Smith. New York: St. Marin's Press, 1992.
Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Edited by Hugh J. Luke, Jr. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
Tropp, Martin. Mary Shelly's Monster. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976.