Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Essay Example for Free

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Essay Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (ni e Godwin; 1797-1851), English novelist, daughter of the British philosopher and novelist William Godwin and the British author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary was born in London. Her mother died ten days after her birth. Her father had many literary friends, and Marys childhood was populated by such figures as William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1812, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Harriet joined their circle. Before Mary was 17, she and Shelley were meeting secretly by her mothers grave in St Pancras churchyard. After Shelleys separation from Harriet in 1814, he and Mary eloped to the Continent. In the eight years before the poets death, the couple lived an unconventional life, moving between Italy, England, and Switzerland, part of a bohemian set that included the poets John Keats and Lord Byron. Harriet Shelleys suicide in December 1816 allowed Mary and Percy to marry. They had four children together, but only one, Percy Florence, survived his parents. The loss of their first child affected Mary profoundly, and seems to have shaped the themes of her first novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818). Mary Shelley conceived this story in 1816, while staying on Lake Geneva as the guest of Byron. According to her introduction to the novel, their host challenged his guests to write a ghost story, and Frankenstein was the product of its authors unusually vivid nightmare. In combining Gothic terrors with extreme physical realism and a basis in the sciences of biology and electricity, Shelley founded the genre of science fiction. The novel is the story of Victor Frankenstein, a medical student who constructs a living being from the remains of dissecting-room corpses. Victors experiments dramatize the morality of the act of creation itself. He explains: I collected bones from charnel- houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. Horrified by the result of his project, Frankenstein abandons the Creature, who wanders the countryside, tormented by his total isolation from humanity. The Creature persuades his creator to construct a second, female being, but Victor dismembers this before it can be brought to life. In revenge, the Creature murders Frankensteins bride. A chase across the world then ensues, Victor determining to pursue the di mon who caused this misery until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict. The Creature, despite his monstrosity, is an intensely tragic figure, and Shelley effects an uncanny merging of its personality with that of Victor, who considers it my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave. A critical and popular success, the book was dedicated to William Godwin. After her husbands death in 1822, Shelley returned to England, where she settled with her son. She was granted a small allowance by her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, but this was temporarily withdrawn when she published Percy Bysshe Shelleys Posthumous Poems (1824). She spent much time editing and annotating her late husbands work, but, owing to Sir Timothys opposition, she was unable to publish the Poetical Works until 1839. Shelley published five other novels. Valperga (1823) is a romance of 14th-century Italy. The Last Man (1826) is an apocalyptic fantasy in which humanity is destroyed by plague. Set in a republican Britain of the year 2073, it traces the effects of global catastrophe on a small group of characters and their wider environment. The final section of the book sees its narrator, Lionel Verney, living in the ruins of a decimated Rome. The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830) is a historical drama much influenced by the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) are domestic stories with strongly autobiographical elements. Another novel, Mathilda (1819), which tells the story of an incestuous relationship between a father and daughter, remained unpublished until 1959. Financing her sons private education, Mary Shelley continued to write essays and short fiction for periodicals such as the Keepsake. Between 1835 and 1838 she produced a series of scholarly biographies for the Lardners Cabinet Cyclopi dia series. The death of Sir Timothy Shelley in 1844 brought a new-found security to her life, but her closing years were troubled by threats of blackmail from embittered members of the Shelley and Byron families. Show preview only The above preview is unformatted text This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our GCSE Mary Shelley section.