Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851, English author; daughter of William Godwin Godwin, William, 1756–1836, English author and political philosopher. A minister in his youth, he was, however, plagued by religious doubts and gave up preaching in 1783 for a literary career.
..... Click the link for more information. and Mary Wollstonecraft Wollstonecraft, Mary (w
..... Click the link for more information. . In 1814 she fell in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley Shelley, Percy Bysshe (bĭsh), 1792–1822, English poet, b. Horsham, Sussex.
..... Click the link for more information. , accompanied him abroad, and after the death of his first wife in 1816 was married to him. Her most notable contribution to literature is her novel of terror, Frankenstein, published in 1818. It is the story of a German student who learns the secret of infusing life into inanimate matter and creates a monster that ultimately destroys him. Included among her other novels are Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), and the partly autobiographical Lodore (1835). After Shelley's death in 1822, she devoted herself to caring for her aged father and educating her only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1839–40 she edited her husband's works.

Bibliography

See her journal (ed. by F. L. Jones, 1947); her letters (ed. by M. Spark and D. Stamford, 1953); biographies by M. Spark (1951, repr. 1988), N. B. Gerson (1973), and M. Seymour (2001); studies by W. A. Walling (1972) and E. Sunstein (1989).

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

orig. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, detail of an oil painting by Richard Rothwell, first exhibited 1840; …

(credit: Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born Aug. 30, 1797, London, Eng.—died Feb. 1, 1851, London) English Romantic novelist. The only daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, she met and eloped with Percy B. Shelley in 1814. They married in 1816 after his first wife committed suicide. Mary Shelley's best-known work is Frankenstein (1818), a narrative of the dreadful consequences of a scientist's artificially creating a human being. After her husband's death in 1822, she devoted herself to publicizing his writings and educating their son. Of her several other novels, the best, The Last Man (1826), is an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague.