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
Intertextuality and Influence Ann Jellicoe
With this play, Jellicoe deliberately broke with her earlier work by writing a narrative drama based on a pre-existing story. She was attracted to the subject of Percy Shelley's life because it gave her the...
Intertextuality and Influence Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington
The elderly lady, Lady Arabella, represents a chilly view of the English aristocracy. She opens her story with a paean in praise of past times and in dispraise of the present: How interminably long the...
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...
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...
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...
Literary responses Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington
This book sparked both sensation and controversy. It was the starting point for Blessington's friendships with Isaac D'Israeli and Edward Bulwer-Lytton .
Feldman, Paula R., editor. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
149
Some critics were sceptical as to whether her friendship with Byron had...
Literary responses Marie de Sévigné
For years MS was ridiculed for her incorrect orthography, but in fact her unorthodox spelling was modern. It was that advocated by the reformers, participants in a movement to reduce the number of unphonetic letters...
Literary Setting Muriel Jaeger
MJ 's introduction says that the world of this novel is a Bellamy-Morris-Wells world.
qtd. in
Stratton, Susan. “Muriel Jaegers The Question Mark, a Response to Bellamy and Wells”. Foundation, No. 80, 1 Sept.–30 Nov. 2000, 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
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...
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...
Occupation Mary Wollstonecraft
She took strongly against the manners of the aristocracy but formed a strong bond with the eldest of her three pupils, Margaret King , who was fourteen years old, tall and plain, with a wonderful...
Occupation Fanny Aikin Kortright
At her father's death it became necessary for FAK and her unmarried sisters to find work, and they all became governesses. Her first job was at Bradford in Yorkshire, in the family of an...
Performance of text Liz Lochhead
Lochhead has reworked this play (about Mary Shelley 's creation of Frankenstein) several times. A revised version was performed at the EdinburghFringe Festival by the Traverse Theatre Club under the new title Blood...
Publishing Muriel Spark
Alan Pryce-Jones , editor of the Times Literary Supplement, commissioned MS for a middle page on Mary Shelley before her book appeared. Spark also gave a talk on Shelley for the BBC Third Programme...
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

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