Mary Shelley

Biography

Mary Shelley was born in 1797 in London, England to Mary Wollstonecraft and the famous atheist William Godwin. She married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816 after the suicide of his first wife.

She began work on Frankenstein in 1816 when staying at Lord Byron's villa on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. She incorporated a number of different sources into her work, not the least being the Promethean myth from Ovid. The influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost can also be discerned within the novel.

Mary edited and annotated her husband's works after his death in 1822 and also wrote a few more novels, none of which even begin to approach the fame and lasting power of Frankenstein, with the possible exception of The Last Man, an intelligent novel of the distant future.

Mary Shelley was interred in St. Peter's Churchyard, Bournemouth, Dorset, England.

External link

• Project Gutenberg e-texts of works by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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