Mary Shelley

Critique • Works

From a dark and stormy night

The story goes that famed poet Lord Byron, physician John Polidori, rising young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley's wife, Mary, were stranded in a chalet at Lake Geneva during a rainy season. They entertained themselves with ghost stories and Byron proposed they each write such a story themselves.

It was mainly a competition between the two acknowledged poetic geniuses, but those two soon gave up the notion of writing prose fiction. However, as a result of the game, Polidori became renowned as the creator of The Vampyre, the forerunner of modern bloodsucking tales—and Mary produced the horror classic, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818).

Romantic journal

Her life was itself a story of great romance and tragedy. She'd been born to prominent intellectuals, philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of ahe seminal feminist tome, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her mother died shortly after her birth.

In her father's intellectual circles Mary met such luminaries as Samuel Coleridge and Shelley. At sixteen she fell in love with the already married Shelley. They eloped to Switzerland where they lived together for two years, despite her father disowning her, until the death of Shelley's wife Harriet in 1816 opened the way to marriage. Together Mary and Percy wrote Journal of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817) about their experiences.

After Frankenstein, the Shelleys moved to Italy and in 1822, at the age of thirty, Percy drowned in the bay near Livorno.

Mary produced many short stories and several more novels, including the romance Valperga (1923) and The Last Man (1826), a work of speculative fiction which has gained recognition recently for its depiction of a future catastrophe and its indictment of patriarchy.

Much of her writing though continued to involve her late husband, as Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) are sometimes considered fictional defences of his work against critics. She also edited collections of his poetry and other writings, and she started on his biography which she eventually abandoned. She published a popular travelogue, Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1844.

Yet Frankenstein remains, by far, her most popular work. Thirty-seven films, and counting, have been based on her novel or featured its characters.

— Eric

 

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