Mary Shelley
Who was Mary Shelley?
English writer (1797–1851)
Biographical data adapted from Wikipedia’s article on Mary Shelley (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Biography
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, born Mary Godwin on 30 August 1797 in Somers Town, London, was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, translator, and editor. Her works include Gothic fiction, science fiction, travel writing, and literary criticism. She's best known for her novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus," published in 1818, which introduced Victor Frankenstein and his creature, and is seen as one of the first science fiction novels. Another of her major novels, "The Last Man," was published in 1826 and offers a dystopian look at a future world devastated by a plague, showing her imaginative and philosophical range.
Shelley was the daughter of two well-known thinkers: political philosopher William Godwin and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after her birth. Raised by her father, she was educated informally but thoroughly, reading extensively and absorbing the radical political and philosophical ideas that defined her parents' legacies. At sixteen, she began a relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of her father's admirers who was also married, and they eloped to Europe in 1814 with her stepsister Claire Clairmont. Upon their return to England, they faced social backlash and financial struggles, along with the trauma of losing a prematurely born daughter.
In the summer of 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley, with Claire Clairmont, spent several weeks near Geneva with poet Lord Byron and his doctor John William Polidori. During this famous gathering, Shelley came up with the story that would become "Frankenstein," reportedly after the group challenged each other to write a ghost story. She and Percy married in December 1816 after Percy's first wife, Harriet Westbrook, committed suicide. The couple moved to Italy in 1818 and endured more personal tragedy with the deaths of two more children. In 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat sank during a storm near Viareggio, leaving Mary a widow at twenty-four.
After returning to England in 1823, Shelley focused on supporting her surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley, and continued her career as a writer. She edited and published her husband's collected works, adding biographical and critical notes that greatly influenced his posthumous reputation. She also wrote stories and essays for magazines, authored several more novels, and translated German and Italian works. The last decade of her life was affected by declining health due to a brain tumor, which led to her death on 1 February 1851 in Bournemouth at the age of fifty-three.
Before Fame
Mary Godwin grew up in a home full of intellectual ambition but faced financial struggles. Her father, William Godwin, was a well-known radical philosopher, and their house was a hub for writers, thinkers, and political activists. Without formal schooling, Mary learned from her father's large library and his interesting friends. Her mother passed away before Mary could know her, which deeply affected her childhood, and her relationship with her stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont, was often difficult.
When she ran away with Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814, Mary broke away from her past and entered one of the most turbulent and creative groups in British Romanticism. In 1816, at the Villa Diodati, she came up with the idea for Frankenstein at age nineteen, already having dealt with significant grief and social rejection. When the novel was published in 1818, at just twenty, she quickly became known as a writer with serious creative talent.
Key Achievements
- Authored Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), one of the earliest and most influential works of science fiction and Gothic literature.
- Wrote The Last Man (1826), a pioneering post-apocalyptic novel exploring themes of isolation, plague, and the end of civilisation.
- Edited and published the collected poems and prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with critical annotations that shaped the reception of Romantic poetry for generations.
- Produced a substantial body of work across multiple genres including novels, short stories, travel writing, biography, and translation.
- Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2004, confirming her lasting recognition as a founder of the genre.
Did You Know?
- 01.Frankenstein was initially published anonymously in 1818, and many readers assumed the author was Percy Bysshe Shelley, in part because he had written the preface; Mary Shelley was not publicly identified as the author until the novel's second edition in 1823.
- 02.The summer of 1816 in which Shelley conceived Frankenstein coincided with the so-called 'Year Without a Summer,' a period of dramatic climate disruption caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which produced widespread crop failures and gloomy skies across Europe.
- 03.Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man, set in the late twenty-first century and depicting the extinction of humanity through plague, was largely forgotten for over a century after publication and was not reprinted in full until 1965.
- 04.She kept a lock of her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley's hair and, according to family accounts, preserved his heart wrapped in a copy of his poem Adonais, which was found among her belongings after her death.
- 05.In 2004, more than 150 years after her death, Mary Shelley was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in recognition of her foundational contribution to the genre.
Family & Personal Life
Awards & Honors
| Award | Year | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame | 2004 | — |