Mary Shelley

-
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 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...
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 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 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
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 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.
149
Some critics were sceptical as to whether her friendship with Byron had...
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...
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 Augusta Webster
During her tenure she encountered the very best and worst of late Victorian poetry. Her published reviews, which critic Marysa Demoor characterises as expressing a hesitant modernism,
Demoor, Marysa. “Women Poets as Critics in the <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘j’>Athenæum</span>: Ungendered Anonymity Unmasked”. Nineteenth-Century Prose, Vol.
24
, No. 1, pp. 51-71.
61
included appraisals of Robert Bridges ,...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Amy Levy
The plot concerns an English governess to an Italian family in Rome, who opposes the love which develops between her and the grown-up son. AL plants allusions to Jane Eyre and to famous English...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.