Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Aug. 30, 1797 - Feb. 1, 1851), born in London, was an English Romantic novelist. She is best known as the author of Frankenstein.
She met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812 and eloped with him to France in July 1814. They married in 1816, after Shelley’s first wife had committed suicide. After her husband’s death in 1822, she returned to England and devoted herself to publicizing Shelley’s writings and to educating their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.
Mary Shelley’s best-known book is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, revised 1831), a text that is part Gothic novel and part philosophical novel; it is also often considered an early example of science fiction. It...More
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Aug. 30, 1797 - Feb. 1, 1851), born in London, was an English Romantic novelist. She is best known as the author of Frankenstein.
She met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812 and eloped with him to France in July 1814. They married in 1816, after Shelley’s first wife had committed suicide. After her husband’s death in 1822, she returned to England and devoted herself to publicizing Shelley’s writings and to educating their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.
Mary Shelley’s best-known book is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, revised 1831), a text that is part Gothic novel and part philosophical novel; it is also often considered an early example of science fiction. It narrates the dreadful consequences that arise after a scientist has artificially created a human being. (The man-made monster in this novel inspired a similar creature in numerous American horror films.) She wrote several other novels, including Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837); The Last Man (1826), an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is often ranked as her best work.