MARY SHELLEY

By laura_trevisan

  • MARY SHELLEY

    She was born in London in 1797. She was the daughter of two radical thinkers: William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, who died after her birth. This event shaped her life and when her father later remarried, this caused her great suffering.

  • P.B. SHELLEY

    Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe.

  • SWITZERLAND

    In Switzerland Percy Shelley rented a country house on the shores of Lake Geneva near Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron used to stay. It was here that Mary conceived the idea for the book that would make her famous, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. One rainy day the group of friends, including John Polidori, an English writer and physicist, entertained themselves by reading ghost stories. at one point Byron suggested they each write a horror story.

  • FRANKENSTEIN

    FRANKENSTEIN
    Mary wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in the tradition of the gothic novel. It was published anonymously.

  • LAST YEARS

    LAST YEARS
    1822 her husband drowned during a storm while sailing near Livorno. Mary Shelley returned to England with her son, where she continued to write novels, among them Valperga (1823), a historical novel set in Medieval Italy, and The Last Man (1826), a story about the destruction of mankind by a plague until only one last surviving man is left. She also published an edition of Percy Shelley’s Poetical Works in 1839. She died in London in 1851.