Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Born: Aug. 30, 1797, London, Eng. Died: Feb. 1, 1851, London, English Romantic novelist best known as the author of Frankenstein.



She was the only daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the spring of 1814 and eloped with him to France in July of that year. The couple were married in 1816, after Shelley's first wife had committed suicide. Mary Shelley apparently came as near as any woman could to meeting Percy Shelley's requirements for his life's partner: "one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy." 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. She published her late husband's Posthumous Poems (1824), and she also edited his Poetical Works (1839), with long and invaluable notes, and his prose works. Her Journal is a rich source of Shelley biography, and her letters are an indispensable adjunct.



Mary Shelley's best-known novel is Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which she 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 several famous American horror films of the 1930s. Mary Shelley wrote several other novels, such as Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837), but The Last Man (1826), an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is still ranked as her best novel. Her travel book History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817) recounts the continental tour she and Shelley took in 1814 following their elopement and then recounts their summer near Geneva in 1816.



F.L. Jones edited her letters (1944) and her journal (1947).

PICTURE: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, detail of an oil painting by R. Rothwell, first exhibited 1840; in the National Portrait Gallery, London By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London