English author Mary Shelley was born on August 30, 1787 in
London. She was the author of the Gothic novel, Frankenstein (1818) and was the second wife
of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was the daughter of two intellectual
heavyweights, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and social reformer William Godwin.
She eloped with Percy Shelley in 1814 and they spent their life together in
Europe. Their married life was brief and tragic. Mary had several miscarriages
and two of her children died, then Percy drowned in 1822 when he was 29 years
old. While in Geneva with her husband and the poet Lord Byron, Mary Shelley
wrote Frankenstein, now a classic of Gothic Romanticism. The story of a
reckless doctor who creates a living monster from the body parts of the dead, Frankenstein
was published in 1818 and has since become the inspiration for many other
stories and films. After her husband's death, Mary returned to England, where
she continued her career as an author and editor of her husband's poems and
prose. Her other novels include Valperga (1823), The Last Man
(1826) and Lodore (1835). From
1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis, which sometimes
prevented her from reading and writing. On February 1, 1851, at Chester Square,
London, she died at the age of fifty-three from what her physician suspected
was a brain tumor. She was buried at St. Peter’s Church, Bournemouth.
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of Literary Legends of the British
Isles. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following
links:
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