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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) - original surname Godwin |
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English Romantic novelist, biographer and editor, best known as the writer of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Mary Shelley was 21 when the book was published; she completed her writing of the novel when she was 17. The story deals with an ambitious young scientist. He creates life but then rejects his creation, a monster. "But success shall crown my endeavours. Whereforenot? Thus far I have gone, tracing a secure way over the pathless seas: the very stars themselves being witnesses and testimonies of my triumph. Why not still proceed over the untamed yet obedient element? What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?" (from Frankenstein by Mary W. Shelley, London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831, p. 10) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died of puerperal fever 10 days after giving birth to her daughter. Mary's labor lasted 18 hours and then it took four hours to remove the rest of the placenta. She was one of the first feminists, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and the novel The Wrongs of Woman, in which she wrote: "We cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us." In the intellectual circles of London, her acquaintances included the painter Henry Fuseli, Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather, and William Blake, who illustrated an edition of her book, Original Stories from Real Life. Fuseli showed her how to dress more fashionable; he eventually left her to marry one of his models. Mary Shelley's father was the writer and political journalist William Godwin, who became famous with his work An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin had revolutionary attitudes to most social institutions, including marriage. In feminism he found an "amazonian" element. Among his other books is Things as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). In her childhood Mary Shelley was left to educate herself amongst her father's intellectual circle, the critic Hazlitt, the essayist Lamb, the poet Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who came into Godwin's circle in 1812. Her first poem she published at the age of ten. Godwin remarried in 1801, but Mary never learned to like her stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont. In 1812 she was sent to live in Dundee. At the age of 16 she ran away to France and Switzerland with Shelley; they had met at the end of 1812. Percy and Mary married in 1816 – Shelley's wife Harriet had committed suicide by drowning. Their first child, a daughter, died in Venice, Italy, a few years later. In History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817) the Shelleys jointly recorded their life. Thereafter they returned to England and Mary gave birth to a son, William. The story of Frankenstein started in 1816, when Mary joined Lord Byron with Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont in the Villa Diodati, in Switzerland, on the shore of Lake Geneva. On a stormy night in June, she took a challenge, set by Byron, to write a ghost story. Byron was the most famous English poet of the time, while Shelley's work was not not known outside a small circle of literary friends. Also another myth emerged from the challenge, The Vampyre, written by Dr. Polidori, Byron's friend. With her husband's encouragement, Mary completed the novel within a year. At the Villa Diodati she had been a "silent listener" of her husband and Byron, who discussed about galvanism. At Eton College Shelley had become interested in Luigi Calvani's experiments with electric shocks to make dead frogs' muscles twitch. It is possible that his teacher, James Lind, had demonstrated the technique to Shelley. Byron and Shelley talked Dr Darwin's experiments with a piece of vermicelli. In her 'Introduction' to the 1831 edition Mary revealed that she got the story from a dream, in which she saw "the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with a uneasy, half vital motion."
The first edition of book, dedicated to Shelley's father
William Godwin, had an unsigned preface by Percy Shelley. Many thought
that it is also his novel, disbelieving that a young woman could write
such horror story. However, when the book was published in 1818 by a
small London publishing house, it became a huge success, although it
received mixed reviews. John Wilson Croker wrote in Quaterly Review
(January 1818) that "the dreams of insanity are embodied in the strong
and striking language of the insane, and the author, notwithstanding
the rationality of his preface, often leaves us in doubt whether he is
not as mad as his hero." Walter Scott, on the other hand, noted that
the work was "written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting
the mixture of hyperbolical Germanisms with which tales of wonder are
usually told" (Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine, March 1818). The
second edition, which came out in France in 1823, credited Mary Shelley
as the author. Succumbing to the pressure of making the story more
conservative, Shelley heavily revised the first "popular" edition,
which appeared in one volume in October 1831. The first
illustrated Frankenstein
since this edition was probably made by Nino Carbe and published by
Illustrated Editions Co. in 1932. In 1818 the Shelleys left England for Italy, where they
remained until Percy Shelley's death – he drowned during a heavy
squall on July 28, 1822, in the Bay of Spezia near Livorno. The corpse
of her husband was burned on the beach; Mary did not have the heart to
witness the burning, so Shelley's friend Edward John Trelawny
took care of it. In letter to her friend Maria Gisborne she said that
"Trelawny . . . supported us in our miseries—my poor Jane and me.
'But for him, menials would have performed the most sacret of offices;
and
when I shake his hand I feel to the depth of my soul that those hands
collected those ashes. Yes; for I saw saw them burned and scorched
from the office. No fatigue—no sun—or nervous horrors—deterred
him, as one or the other of these causes deterred all others. He stood
on the burning sand for many hours beside the pyre; if he had been
permitted by the soldiers, he would have placed him there in his arms."
(Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources,
edited by Lady Shelley, to which is added An Essay on Christianity by
Percy Bysshe Shelley, second edition, Edward Moxon & Co., 1862, p.
216) Shelley kept the heart of her husband, wrapped in pages of poetry, in
her portable desk. In 1819 Mary suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of
William, who died of malaria at the age of 3. Mary had also lost a
daughter the previous year. In 1822 she had a dangerous miscarriage and
she believed that she would die. Mary Shelley wrote in August 1822 to her friend Maria
Gisborne about this loss and her husband's death, concluding the
letter: "Well here is my story—the last story I shall have to
tell—all that might have been bright in my life is now
despoiled. I shall live to improve myself, to take care of my
child, and render myself worthy to join him. Soon my weary pilgrimage
will begin. I rest now, but soon I must leave Italy, and then there is an end of all but despair." (The Life & Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Vol. II, by Julian Marshall, Richard Bentley & Son, 1889, pp. 20-21) Of their children only one, Percy Florence,
survived infancy. In 1823 Mary returned with her son to England,
determined not to-re-marry. She devoted herself to his welfare and
education and continued her career as a professional writer. Sir
Timothy Shelley, her father-in-law, was not eager to help her and her
son Percy financially. Mary Shelley never married, but she flirted with
the young French writer Prosper Merimee, and
hoped to marry Maj. Aubrey Beauclerk. None of Shelley's novels from this period matched the power of her first legendary achievement. Her later works include Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1937), both romantic pot-boilers, and unfinished Mathilda (1819, published 1959), which draws on her relations with Godwin and Shelley. Valperga (1823) is a romance set in the 14th-century, and The Last Man (1826), set in the 21st century republican England, depicts the end of human civilization. Its second part describes the gradual destruction of the human race by plague. The narrator is Lionel Verney, the last man of the title, living amidst the ruins of Rome. Feminist critics have paid attention to its fantasy of the total corrosion of patriarchal order. Shelley gave up writing long fiction when realism started to
gain popularity, exemplified in the works of Charles Dickens. She wrote
a numerous short stories for popular periodicals, particularly The
Keepsaker, produced several volumes of Lives for Lardner's Cabinet
Cyclopedia, the first authoritative edition of Shelley's poems
(1839, 4 vols.), and also attempted a biography on Shelley but abandoned the work. Shelley's well-received travelogue Rambles in
Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 came
out in
1844. "Englishmen, in particular, ought to sympathise in their [the
Italians's] struggle: for the aspiration of free institutions all over
the word has its source in England . . . " she wrote in the Preface.
While in Rome, she went to see Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine
Chapel and
praised their "simple grandeur," but at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence
she wrote that there Michelangelo's "love of the naked was carried to a
curious excess. In the Tribune, is a Holy Family, into which he has
introduced a variety of naked figures in different attitudes, that have
not the smallest connection with the subject of the picture, but
intrude impertinenntly to mar its effect." Mary Shelley died of brain
cancer on February 1, 1851, in her home at Chester Square, London. She was 53 years old. By the 2020s, the story of Frankenstein's monster had inspired over 70 films. James Whale's version from 1931, starring Boris Karloff, is considered a classic, and became the major source for a number of other adaptations. The monster kills little Maria on the lake and is hunted down and destroyed. All reviews of the film were not positive: "I regret to report that it is just another movie, so thoroughly mixed with water as to have a horror content of about .0001 percent... The film differs greatly from the book and soon turns into a sort of comic opera with a range of cardboard mountains over which extras in French Revolution costumes dash about with flaming torches." (Creighton Peet in Outlook & Independent, December 9, 1931) Mel Brook's parody Young Frankenstein (1974), starring Gene Wilder in the role of the famous doctor, was beautifully photographed – Brooks used many archaic optical devices, including the old 1:85 aspect ratio for height and width of the frame. The film received an Academy Award nomination for its script. Among its highlights is the scene in which Peter Boyle as the monster visits a well-meaning, lonely blind man, Gene Hackman, who nearly manages to destroy his guest. Kenneth's Branagh's adaptation Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) was faithful to the book. The director himself was Frankenstein and Robert De Niro played the monster under a heavy mask. For further reading: Mary Shelley: A Biography by R. Glynn Grylls (1938); Child of Light by Muriel Spark (1951); Mary Shelley by Eileen Bigland (1959); Ariel Like a Harpy by Christopher Small (1972); Mary Shelley by William Walling (1972); The Frankenstein Legend by Donald Glut (1973); The Annotated Frankenstein by Leonard Wolf (1977); Moon in Eclipse by Jane Dunn (1978); Mary Shelley by Harold Bloom (1985); Approaches to Teaching Shelley's Frankenstein, ed. by Stephen C. Behrendt, Anne Kostelanetz Mellor (1990); Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters by Anne K. Mellor (1990); Hideous Progenies by Steven Earl Forry (1990); Frankenstein: Mary Shelley's Wedding Guest by Mary Lowe-Evans (1993); Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction by Betty, T. Bennett (1998); Frankenstein Creation and Monstrosity, ed. by Stephen Bann (1995); In Search of Frankenstein by Radu Florescu (1997); Mary Shelley: Frankenstein's Creator: First Science Fiction Writer by Joan Kane Nichols (1998); Frankenstein: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed by Johanna M. Smith (2000); Readings on Frankenstein, ed. by Don Nardo (2000); Mary Shelley: Bride of Frankenstein by Miranda Seymour (2001); The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler (2007); A Life with Mary Shelley by Barbara Johnson, Shoshana Felman and Judith Butler (2014); Mary Shelley by Angela Wright (2018); The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by Anna Mercer (2020); Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics by Sylvana Tomaselli (2021) - See also: Robert Louis Stevenson Selected works:
Frankenstein films:
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