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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
was born in London. Her mother,
Mary Wollstonecraft, died of
puerperal fever 10 days after
giving birth to her daughter.
Mary's labor lasted 18 hours
and then it took four hours
to remove the rest of the placenta.
She was one of the first feminists,
the author of A
Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792), and the
novel The Wrongs of Woman,
in which she wrote: "We
cannot, without depraving our
minds, endeavour to please a
lover or husband, but in proportion
as he pleases us.
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Mary Shelley's father
was the writer and political
journalist William Godwin,
who became famous with
his work An Enquiry
Concerning Political
Justice (1793).
Godwin had revolutionary
attitudes to most social
institutions, including
marriage. In feminism
he found an "amazonian"
element. Among his other
books is Things
as They Are, or
The Adventures of
Caleb Williams
(1794).
In her childhood Mary
Shelley was left to
educate herself amongst
her father's intellectual
circle, the critic Hazlitt,
the essayist Lamb, the
poet Coleridge and Percy
Bysshe Shelley, who
came into Godwin's circle
in 1812. |
Godwin took a second in 1801,
but Mary never learned to like
her. In 1812 Godwin sent her
to live in Dundee. Mary published
her first poem at the age of
ten. At the age of 16 she ran
away to France and Switzerland
with Shelley; they had met at
the end of 1812. Percy and Mary
married in 1816 - Shelley's
wife Harriet had committed suicide
by drowning. Their first child,
a daughter, died in Venice,
Italy, a few years later. In
History of Six Weeks Tour
(1817) the Shelleys jointly
recorded their life. Thereafter
they returned to England and
Mary gave birth to a son, William.
The
story of Frankenstein
started on summer in 1816, when
Mary joined with Percy Shelley
and Claire Clairmont near Geneva
Lord Byron. She took a challenge,
set by Lord Byron, to write
a ghost story. With her husband's
encouragement, she completed
the novel within a year. At
the Villa Diodati she had been
a "silent listener"
of her husband and Byron, who
discussed about galvanism. At
Eton College Shelley had become
interested in Luigi Calvani's
experiments with electric shocks
to make dead frogs' muscles
twitch. It is possible that
his teacher, James Lind, had
demonstrated the technique to
Shelley. Byron and Shelley talked
Dr. Darwin's experiments with
a piece of vermicelli. In her
'Introduction' to the 1831 edition
Mary revealed that she got the
story from a dream, in which
she saw "the hideous phantasm
of a man stretched out, and
then, on the working of some
powerful engine, show signs
of life, and stir with a uneasy,
half vital motion."
The
first edition of book had an
unsigned preface by Percy Shelley.
Many thought that it is also
his novel, disbelieving that
only 19-year-old woman could
write such horror story. However,
when the book was published
in 1818, it became a huge success,
although it received mixed reviews.
None
of Shelley's novels from this
period matched the power of
her first legendary achievement.
Her later works include Lodore
(1835) and Faulkner
(1937), both romantic pot-boilers,
and unfinished Mathide (1819,
published 1959), which draws
on her relations with Godwin
and Shelley. Valperga
(1823) is a romance set in the
14th-century, and The Last
Man (1826), set in the
21st century republican England,
depicts the end of human civilization.
Its second part describes the
gradual destruction of the human
race by plague. The narrator
is Lionel Verney, the last man
of the title, living amidst
the ruins of Rome. Feminist
critics have paid attention
to its fantasy of the total
corrosion of patriarchal order. |
