- Introduction
Learn- Try It
- Task
Learn
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was born in 1797 in London, England. Some time after her mother’s death when Shelley was an infant, her father remarried a woman who already had two children. Shelley did not get along with her step-mother who sent one of her daughters off to school to be educated. She did not think that Mary needed to be educated so she kept her at home. Mary took full advantage of her father’s library, reading for large amounts of time. She would often write stories to help her escape from the realities of her childhood.
When Mary was a teenage girl, many influential people came to her house. Percy Shelley was one of these. While he was really impressed by Mary’s father, he soon fell in love with Mary. The problem was that Percy Shelley was already married. Because Mary did not like her home life, when Percy asked her to elope to Europe with him, she agreed. Her father did not speak to her for some time after that.
Mary and Percy Shelley took trips together because they could not be married at the time. On one adventure, they went to Europe to visit Lord Byron in Switzerland. One evening while the weather was really bad, they entertained themselves by telling ghost stories. Lord Byron had an idea that they each should write their own supernatural tale. Because Mary’s imagination was so vast, she conceived the idea of Frankenstein. She was only nineteen years old when it was published. It was the first science fiction novel and a literary masterpiece. Shelley’s ideas of nature and of making a monster out of corpses instead of out of inanimate parts make her novel very Romantic.
Mary Shelley finally married Percy after his first wife, Harriet, drowned herself. They lived somewhat happily (Percy had other extra-marital affairs) until Percy was drowned in a shipping accident when he was only twenty-nine years old. After his death, she spent the rest of her life putting together Percy’s writings into publishable volumes. She did write more herself, but nothing ever measured up to Frankenstein. She died of brain cancer in 1851 in London, England.
Instead of reading the entire novel Frankenstein, we are going to read Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. In it, she gives her account of the events that led her to write this now famous horror novel. Click on the link and read through the Introduction. Read carefully because you will have some questions to answer in the Task section.
 |
 |