Mary Shelley

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Standard Name: Shelley, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
Married Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Pseudonym: Mary S.
Pseudonym: Mrs Caroline Barnard
MS , long known almost exclusively for Frankenstein, is now being read for her later novels and her plays, as well as for her journals and letters. Her editing, reviewing, biographical, and journalistic work entitle her to the designation woman of letters. She is an important figure among women Romantics, and a channel for the reformist ideals of the 1790s forwards into the Victorian era.
Half-length painting of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell, exhibited 1840. She sits on a red-draped couch, gazing serenely forward, wearing a black dress that leaves her shoulders bare. She has a gold waistband and gold band in her hair. A vertical streak of light on the right is thought by some to represent the spirit of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Eliza Fenwick
On 23 July 1810, after a year which she said had taught [her] new griefs whose nature she does not explain, Fenwick wrote in anguish to Hays, who had stopped communicating with her. She knew...
Friends, Associates Eliza Fenwick
EF fully shared in her husband's friendship with William Godwin . She exchanged visits with him, sometimes with one or other of her children, from the time she first entertained him in November 1788. He...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Gaskell
Mary Barton contains remarkable scenes of domestic life amongst the working classes and harrowing portraits of industrial suffering, particularly the oozing cellar where a friend of the Bartons dies.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. Editor Foster, Jennifer, Broadview.
97-9
Throughout the text, EG preaches...
Friends, Associates George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron
His final exit from England was made in the company of Hobhouse , and on the shores of Lake Geneva he met up with Percy and Mary Shelley and Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont , with...
death William Godwin
WG , novelist, political philosopher, widower of Mary Wollstonecraft , and father of Mary Shelley , died in London.
Sherburn, George, and William Godwin. “Introduction”. Caleb Williams, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, p. vii - xx.
xvii
Family and Intimate relationships William Godwin
He was already famous (or, to some, infamous) for his writings when he and Mary Wollstonecraft became lovers in August 1796. They married on 29 March 1797 (although both of them disapproved of the institution...
Occupation William Godwin
The imprint M. J. Godwin and Company was launched the following year. The business flourished, becoming almost a literary salon like that of Joseph Johnson : visitors included Germaine de Staël . It remained, however...
Literary responses Beatrice Harraden
Marie Belloc Lowndes described this book for the Times Literary Supplement as a strangely poignant drama and likened it to Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein and Sir Walter Scott 's Waverley for its comparable ability to...
Friends, Associates William Hazlitt
In 1817 he was sitting up until three in the morning with Percy and Mary Shelley discussing monarchy and republicanism.
Shelley, Mary. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844. Editors Feldman, Paula R. and Diana Scott-Kilvert, Johns Hopkins University Press.
163
Literary responses Caroline Herschel
Late in Herschel's long life the honours showered upon her generally recognised her as a woman scientist. By 1842 young ladies at or near Augusta, Georgia, USA, had formed a Caroline Herschel Association —and...
Textual Features Barbara Hofland
BH explains that she intends to vindicate the character of Richard III (who in her view came back as Perkin Warbeck ) and expose Henry VII as a villain. She used the British Museum again...
Literary responses Fanny Holcroft
The Critical gave this novel a detailed notice starting from the proposition that FH had not had critical justice because of unfair comparisons with her eminent father. It praised the contrast in personality between the...
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Inchbald
Mary Shelley said of EI : Very susceptible to the softer feelings, she could yet guard herself against passion.
Manvell, Roger. Elizabeth Inchbald: England’s Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in 18th Century London. University Press of America.
107
Although she was a flirt, she was known to be chaste.
Conger, Syndy McMillen. “Multivocality in Mary Shelley’s Unfinished Memoirs of Her Father”. European Romantic Review, Vol.
9
, No. 3, pp. 303-22.
306
Wealth and Poverty Elizabeth Inchbald
Mary Shelley made some interesting comments on her attitudes to money. According to Shelley EI 's life was . . . spent in an interchange of hardship and amusement, privation and luxury, and her character...
Literary Setting Muriel Jaeger
MJ 's introduction says that the world of this novel is a Bellamy-Morris-Wells world.
Stratton, Susan. “Muriel Jaeger’s <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>The Question Mark</span>, a Response to Bellamy and Wells”. Foundation, No. 80, pp. 62-9.
65
William Morris wrote socialist utopias; Edward Bellamy 's Looking Backward, 1888, features time-travel to a future utopia, while H. G. Wells

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