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
Occupation William Harrison Ainsworth
The son of a solicitor, he entered the same profession but left to pursue his literary ambitions. He wrote many historical novels. As editor or proprietor of Bentley's Magazine, Ainsworth's Magazine, and the...
Textual Production Naomi Alderman
NA writes frequently in the Guardian. For instance, in an article on the televising of Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid's Tale she provides a sketch of utopian and dystopian fiction by women, from Margaret Cavendish
Intertextuality and Influence Margaret Atwood
Doctor Frankenstein begins as I, the performer / in the tense arena,
Atwood, Margaret, and Charles Pachter. Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein. Cranbrook Academy of Art.
i
working in a void upon emptiness. He confronts his potential creation like an opponent. The thing / refuses to be shaped, it...
Intertextuality and Influence Margaret Atwood
Several of these poems, like Death of a Young Son by Drowning, treat actual incidents of Moodie's life while transforming the plaintive tone adopted in Moodie's own narratives into one of tragedy. Atwood's handling...
Family and Intimate relationships W. H. Auden
Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University formerly maintained on his website at http://www.stanford.edu/~njenkins/ a section called W. H. Auden. Family Ghosts, designed to show how Auden's family, despite his claims to ordinariness, sprang from a...
Family and Intimate relationships Mary Cowden Clarke
Both Novellos were close friends of Mary Shelley during the 1820s. Mary gave Vincent a lock of the hair of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft .
Crook, Nora. “Fourteen New Letters by Mary Shelley”. Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol.
62
, pp. 37-61.
43
Friends, Associates Mary Cowden Clarke
MCC 's parents frequently entertained eminent literary figures in a drawing-room where the paintings were all executed by distinguished friends. At an early age she became acquainted with Charles and Mary Lamb , Leigh Hunt
Education Mary Cowden Clarke
MCC later remembered her responsibility, when very young, of escorting her two next younger brothers to their school.
Clarke, Mary Cowden. My Long Life. Dodd, Mead.
10
Unlike them, she began her education at home. She writes fondly about the rich array of...
Textual Features Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
In another letter MEC notes that she found the writing of Sara Coleridge (her cousin) and Mary Shelley intensely Englishwomanly.
Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth. Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge. Editor Sichel, Edith, Constable.
219
She concedes that both these writers possess the gift of imagination, but is not...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Ella D'Arcy
Maurois shamelessly fictionalizes and romanticises Shelley; he is more interested in the life than the works, and the same is of course true of his treatment of Mary Shelley , who begins as a beautiful...
Reception Mary Angela Dickens
Another Freak, also published in MAD 's collection Some Women's Ways, is reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Short Stories by Women (1998) alongside works by both well-known and obscure authors, including Maria Edgeworth , Mary Shelley
Textual Features Maureen Duffy
MD 's protagonist here is a being created by experiment, half-man, half-gorilla, a person of two worlds, animal and human.
Duffy, Maureen. That’s How It Was. Virago.
x
This story translates into speciesism the classism which Duffy says she has always lived...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Helen Dunmore
The title poem pictures a man skating on a pond; he has the air, though, of a long-distance rather than a pleasure skater, and the poem imagines him going on forever, mounting the crusted waves...
Friends, Associates Margiad Evans
A young poet whom she calls B—, a descendant of Percy Shelley (and therefore presumably of Mary Shelley too), whom she had known since his boyhood, moved from his own cottage to stay with ME
Textual Features Elizabeth Fenton
Fenton sets out to paint a a familiar picture of the everyday occurrences, manners, and habits of life of persons undistinguished either by wealth or fame
Fenton, Elizabeth. The Journal of Mrs. Fenton. Editor Lawrence, Sir Henry, Edward Arnold.
1-2
in British India. But this is largely unfulfilled...

Timeline

4 April 1788: At about the time that he lost his religious...

Writing climate item

4 April 1788

At about the time that he lost his religious faith, William Godwin began keeping a diary, which he continued almost daily until 26 March 1836, only two weeks before he died.

1806: The Last Man, or Omegarus and Syderia, a...

Writing climate item

1806

The Last Man, or Omegarus and Syderia, a Romance in Futurity appeared anonymously (twenty years before Mary Shelley 's novel with the same main title): it was translated from Jean-Baptiste François-Xavier Cousin de Grainville 's...

10 April 1815: The largest volcanic eruption in modern times,...

National or international item

10 April 1815

The largest volcanic eruption in modern times, that of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia, buried an entire civilization. It had twice the magnitude of the later Krakatoa eruption.

: The launching of the first Rhine pleasure...

Building item

Spring1816

The launching of the first Rhine pleasure boat powered by steam amazed onlookers and was reported in newspapers. The first cross-Channel steamer began operating the same year.

By 18 September 1820: A nationwide campaign of women petitioning...

National or international item

By 18 September 1820

A nationwide campaign of women petitioning on behalf of Queen Caroline was one factor in the abandoning of her trial for adultery.

1883: In Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra),...

Writing climate item

1883

In Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra), Friedrich Nietzsche coined his idea of the lastman, as the citizen of a democray, who has, Nietsche thought, abandoned self-mastery and settled for living as a slave.

By early October 1930: London publisher Gerald Howe issued a composite...

Building item

By early October 1930

London publisher Gerald Howe issued a composite biography entitled Six Women of the World, which had previously made up six volumes in a Representative Women series, 1927-9.

Texts

Shelley, Mary. “Chronology”. The Journals of Mary Shelley: 1814-1844, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. xxxvii - xlii.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments. Editor Shelley, Mary, Edward Moxon, 1840.
Shelley, Mary. Falkner. Saunders and Otley, 1837.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor and Jones.
Shelley, Mary, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland. T. Hookham and C. and J. Ollier, 1817.
Shelley, Mary. “Introduction”. Frankenstein, edited by David Lorne Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, Broadview, 1994, pp. 11-43.
Shelley, Mary. “Introduction”. The Last Man, edited by Anne McWhir, Broadview, 1996, p. xiii - xlv.
Shelley, Mary. “Introduction”. Lodore, edited by Lisa Vargo, Broadview, 1997, pp. 9-45.
Shelley, Mary. Lodore. Richard Bentley, 1835.
Shelley, Mary. Lodore. Editor Vargo, Lisa, Broadview, 1997.
Shelley, Mary. Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings. Editor Crook, Nora, Pickering and Chatto, 2002.
Shelley, Mary. Mathilda. Editor Nitchie, Elizabeth, University of North Carolina Press, 1959.
Shelley, Mary. Novels and Selected Works. Editor Crook, Nora, William Pickering, 1996.
Shelley, Mary. Perkin Warbeck. Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Posthumous Poems. Editor Shelley, Mary, John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824.
Shelley, Mary. Proserpine & Midas: Two Unpublished Mythological Dramas by Mary Shelley. Editor Koszul, André Henri, Humphrey Milford, 1922.
Shelley, Mary. “Prosperine”. The Winter’s Wreath, Whittaker, pp. 1-20.
Shelley, Mary. Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843. Edward Moxon, 1844.
Shelley, Mary. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844. Editors Feldman, Paula R. and Diana Scott-Kilvert, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Editor McWhir, Anne, Broadview, 1996.
Shelley, Mary. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Editor Bennett, Betty T., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Shelley, Mary. Valperga. G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823.