Mary Shelley

Lydia Bujarski

Mrs. Wright

British Literature

1 November 2011

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was a very productive British Novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer who created a book that resembled the bible but went against a lot of things with Christianity. She was born August 30, 1797, and she died February 1, 1851. She was born in Somers Town, London with the name Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft who was a feminist, philosopher, educator and writer. Her father was William Godwin who was also a philosopher, and a journalist and novelist. After Mary was born her mother died 10 days later of puerperal fever, which is a bacterial infection, which comes along sometimes during childbirth. Her father eventually remarried, which brought two-step children into the family. Her father in many subjects tutored Mary and she read many of his books, which made her a very intelligent young girl at the age of 15.

In 1811, Mary's father sent her to a boarding school is Ramsgate. Then, in June 1812, he sent her to stay with the "dissenting family of the radical William Baxter" which was near Dundee, Scotland. Later, in 1831 she started the introduction to her most famous piece "Frankenstein". She stated, "I wrote then--but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered." By the time she was nineteen "Frankenstein" was finished. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley)

While she was in Scotland, in between her coming and leaving, she met a "radical-poet philosopher" Percy Bysshe Shelley. They then began to start secretly meeting each other in a Churchyard, and they eventually fell in love. She was almost seventeen, and he was almost 22. He father disapproved their relationship, which later inspired her writing called " my excessive and romantic attachment to my father". Since he did not approve Percy and Mary ran off to France together, taking her stepsister Claire Clairmont, and leaving Percy's un-divorced pregnant wife behind.

During the journey, Mary became pregnant, and birthed a premature baby girl who later died 12 days after her birth. She then was overcome with depression that was very hard for her to come out of, but she didn't let that keep her down. On January 28, 1816, Mary birthed a baby boy and named him William. Mary, William, Percy, and Claire all then later traveled to Geneva. There, they planned on spending the summer with a poet Lord Byron, who was the father of Claire's unborn child. In Geneva she expanded