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Portrait of Mary Shelley

Literature · Novelists

Mary Shelley

1797–1851 · English

Romanticism; Gothic fiction and early science fiction

Mary Shelley, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, began Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus during a ghost-story contest at Lake Geneva in 1816. Published in 1818, when she was 20, it is a Gothic classic often called the first science-fiction novel; she also wrote the apocalyptic The Last Man.

How to spot them

  • ▸Victor Frankenstein and his nameless Creature; the Modern Prometheus
  • ▸Villa Diodati, 1816, the 'Year Without a Summer', with Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori
  • ▸Daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin
  • ▸The Last Man, a novel of plague wiping out humanity

Key works

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818 (revised 1831))

A Genevan student at Ingolstadt creates life, and his abandoned Creature takes revenge

The Last Man (1826)

Lionel Verney narrates the destruction of humanity by plague in the late 21st century

Valperga (1823)

Historical novel of 14th-century Italy and the tyrant Castruccio Castracani

Mathilda (written 1819–1820 (published 1959))

Novella of a father's incestuous love, unpublished for well over a century

History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817)

Travel account, with Percy Shelley, of their 1814 elopement journey and 1816 trip to Geneva

Lodore (1835)

Later domestic novel of a father and daughter

Key ideas

  • The overreaching scientist and the responsibilities of a creator towards what he creates
  • The Creature as an eloquent outcast made monstrous by rejection

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London; her mother died days after her birth
  • •Eloped with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814; they married in December 1816
  • •Frankenstein grew out of Byron's challenge at the Villa Diodati in June 1816; Polidori's contribution became The Vampyre
  • •Frankenstein is framed by letters from the Arctic explorer Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Saville
  • •Other characters include Elizabeth Lavenza and Henry Clerval; the Creature is never named
  • •Frankenstein was first published anonymously, with a preface by Percy Shelley
  • •Percy Shelley drowned off Italy in 1822; only one of their children, Percy Florence, survived to adulthood
  • •Buried in St Peter's Church, Bournemouth

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Sources