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 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...
Textual Features Jane Loudon
This strikingly inventive and ingenious tale seems to owe a good deal to Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein (though Shelley receives no tribute in passing, as do R. B. Sheridan , Byron , and especially Scott
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Liz Lochhead
The title poem meditates on Mary Shelley 's creation of her novel Frankenstein (Eyes on those high peaks / . . . [she] sat down to quill and ink / and icy paper)...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Liz Lochhead
In considering the question of why Mary Shelley created monsters, LL says she was haunted by that phrase from Goya : The sleep of reason produces monsters. If you try to force things to be...
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...
Friends, Associates Mary Lamb
Friends were still being added to the Lambs' circle late in their lives, including literary friends like John Clare and Thomas Hood . Charles corresponded with Mary Shelley ; ML corresponded with Mary Matilda Betham
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...
Textual Features Sophia King
This novel about the genesis of evil is told in the first person by its wicked yet pitiable male narrator, presented as a man of strong intellect and strong feeling, whose first words are What...
Friends, Associates John Keats
Keats was taught and was influenced as a young man by Charles Cowden Clarke . Another important literary friendship was that with Leigh Hunt , then Percy and Mary Shelley and William Hazlitt .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Mary...
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...
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
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 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...

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