Born: Aug 30, 1797, London, England
Died: Feb 1, 1851, London
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was a English novelist. Daughter of the British philosopher William Godwin and the British author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, she was born in London, and privately educated. She met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in May 1814, and two months later left England with him. When Shelley’s first wife died in December 1816, he married Mary. In 1818, her first and most important work, the novel Frankenstein, was published. A remarkable accomplishment for a 20-year-old, the work was an immediate critical and popular success. Repeatedly dramatized for both the theatre and motion pictures, this tale of Frankenstein, a student of the occult, and the sub-human monster he assembles from parts of human corpses added a new word to the English language: A “Frankenstein” is any creation that ultimately destroys its creator. No other work by Mary Shelley achieved the popularity or excellence of this first work, although she wrote four other novels, books of travel sketches, and miscellaneous tales and verse. One of her novels, The Last Man (1826), reveals her liberal social outlook; another of her books, Lodore (1835), is a novelized autobiography.
