Mary Wollstonecraft

Shelley

Mary Shelley’s Background

• Born in 1797. Daughter of two intellectual radicals:

• Mother was Mary Wollstonecraft: early women’s rights activist. She died ten days after Mary’s birth.

• Father was William Godwin: political philosopher and novelist. He was admired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

• As a child, Mary heard Coleridge recite “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in her living room.

Novels and her Tragic Life

• She married Percy Shelley at the age of 16• At the age of 18 she wrote Frankenstein:

The Modern Prometheus.• Frankenstein is the greatest example of

British Romanticism in the novel form.• She gave birth to 4 children in 5 years. 3

of them died in infancy.• Shelley lost her husband in a boating

accident after only 8 years of marriage.• Critics say that Frankenstein is greatly

influenced by the themes of Birth and Death.

The Publishing of Frankenstein

• Mary Shelley did not attach her name to the novel, so many people assumed her husband wrote it.

• The story was inspired by a trip to the Swiss Alps when she, Percy, and Byron challenged each other to tell ghost stories.

• She wrote the novel in a year, and it was published when she was 19.

Frankenstein• A young Swiss student discovers the

secret of animating lifeless matter and, by assembling body parts, creates a monster who vows revenge on his creator after being rejected by society.

Her Final Years• Mary spent the last years of her life in

the loving company of her son and two good friends.

• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley died in 1851 at the age of fifty-three.

Gothicism• Part of the Romantic Movement that started

in the late eighteenth century and lasted to roughly three decades into the nineteenth century.

• Characterized by innovation, spontaneity, freedom of thought and expression, an idealization of nature and the belief of living in an age of "new beginnings and high possibilities."

Gothic Literature

• Watch for elements of Gothic literature (this is the type of literature that inspired Hawthorne and Poe).

• Eerie and supernatural events• Melancholy atmosphere• Reflects wild, unpredictable aspects

of nature• Desolate and harsh landscapes