Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53.
About Mary Shelley in brief
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband’s works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Shelley’s achievements. Shelley’s works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53. Mary Shelley was born in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator and writer Mary Woll stonecraft. Her mother was the philosopher and feminist activist Mary Wolstonecraft. Mary’s mother died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Mary Godwin was left to bring up Mary, along with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Woll Stonecraft’s child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay. A year after WollStonecraft’s death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute.
However, because the MemoirS revealed Wollestonecraft’s affairs and her illegitimate child, they were seen as shocking. MaryGodwin read these memoirs and her mother’s books, and was brought up to cherish her mother’s memory. In December 1801 he married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children. Most of Godwin’s friends disliked his new wife, describing her as quick-tempered and detestable. Together, the couple started a publishing firm called Mwins and started publishing books. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. The couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novels, Valperga, Perkin Warbeck and The Last Man. But he cast himself cast about for a second wife, Louis Louis Louis Clairmont—Charles and Claire—Charles Kegan Kegan later suggested that Mrs Godwin had favoured her own children over those of her own. Mary Jane and Claire were married in 1801, and Charles and Claire later had two children of their own. The marriage was a success, and the couple had a son, Percy Florence Shelley, who died in 1818. The family moved to Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child.
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This page is based on the article Mary Shelley published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
