If you love to read horror or paranormal novels, then you have Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to thank for it -- August 30 marks 225 years since her birth. Her masterpiece was Frankenstein.
ISBN: 9781593081614
Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creatureturns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein. Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and an important ancestor of both the horror and science fiction genres, not only tells a terrifying story, but also raises rofound, disturbing questions about the very nature of life and the place of humankind within the cosmos: What does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have to each other? How far can we go in tampering with Nature?
Her story began in tragedy: a motherless child, she lived in the shadow of her famous feminist namesake mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose death devastated her father while her political writings spurred feminists throughout England and beyond. She was the famous "orphan" daughter of William Godwin, who came from a long line of English Dissenters, who faced religious discrimination by the British government. His stoic personality and political philosophies led to his hopeless devotion to wife Mary, before and after her death, as well as his fatherhood of his namesake daughter, as devoted to her and her older sister Fanny as anything, longing to "blow them a kiss" in his letters home. When he remarried, Mary hated her stepmother, but kept her parents' philosophies close, transforming herself with Godwin's help into a member of intellectual circles. Godwin had high hopes for Mary, giving her a more rigorous intellectual experience than most women of her period, and describing her as "very intelligent." He wished to give his daughter a more "masculine education" and prepared her to be a writer. As the daughter of two literary celebrities, she was literally commodified at birth and immediately entered the speculative economy of the marketplace. However, Godwin withdrew his support as Mary became a woman and pursued her relationship with poet Percy Shelley. Mary's complicated relationships were brought to a head by the wild life of Shelley, who caroused and fathered children with other women while being married to Harriet Shelley, including the young Mary as his second muse and wife. Throughout their travels Mary was sick and often pregnant, and her own father William Godwin refused to grant them a penny.
In 1815, she gave birth to a girl, two months premature, whose nighttime convulsions in her mother's arms led to death in the morning. The loss sent Mary into deep depression, and she reported having visions of death and ghostly infants. When she conceived again, this time delivering son William, she and Percy Shelley decided to go to Italy to spend a cold, wet summer away. Mary had lost her beloved sister Fanny to suicide, and her fear that William would die as his sister had died haunted her. While staying with friends, writing and journaling all summer, Mary Shelley began work on what she considered a short story: filled with grim terrors, buoyed by the creation and death so recently seen in her family, the story would become Frankenstein, the first novelistic treatment of horror in the modern age.
Other writers have made her life from Lake Geneva, Italy into a tale of how real life terrors inspired the book:
ISBN: 9781626725003
"Both timely and terrifying." --Gregory Macguire, New York Times-bestselling author of Wicked Pairing free verse with over three hundred pages of black-and-white watercolor illustrations, Mary's Monster is a unique and stunning biography of Mary Shelley, the pregnant teenage runaway who became one of the greatest authors of all time. Legend is correct that Mary Shelley began penning Frankenstein in answer to a dare to write a ghost story. What most people don't know, however, is that the seeds of her novel had been planted long before that night. By age nineteen, she had been disowned by her family, was living in scandal with a married man, and had lost her baby daughter just days after her birth. Mary poured her grief, pain, and passion into the powerful book still revered two hundred years later, and in Mary's Monster, author/illustrator Lita Judge has poured her own passion into a gorgeous book that pays tribute to the life of this incredible author. A 2019 NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Book A 2019 Amelia Bloomer Project Book This title has Common Core connections.
ISBN: 0801863341
"Not this time, Victor!": Mary Shelley's reversioning of Elizabeth, from Frankenstein to Falkner / Betty T. Bennett -- "To speak in Sanchean phrase": Cervantes and the politics of Mary Shelley's History of a six weeks' tour / Jeanne Moskal -- The impact of Frankenstein / William St. Clair -- From The fields of fancy to Matilda: Mary Shelley's changing conception of her novella / Pamela Clemit -- Mathilda as dramatic actress / Charles E. Robinson -- Between romance and history: possibility and contingency in Godwin, Leibniz, and Mary Shelley's Valperga / Tilottama Rajan -- Future uncertain: the republican tradition and its destiny in Valperga / Michael Rossington -- Reading the end of the world: The last man, history, and the agency of romantic authorship / Samantha Webb -- Kindertotenlieder: Mary Shelley and the art of losing / Constance Walker -- Politicizing the personal: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and the coterie novel / Gary Kelly -- Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley: the female author between public and private spheres / Mitzi Myers -- Poetry as souvenir: Mary Shelley in the annuals / Judith Pascoe -- "Trying to make it as good as I can": Mary Shelley's editing of P.B. Shelley's poetry and prose / Michael O'Neill -- Mary Shelley's Lives and the reengendering of history / Greg Kucich -- Blood sisters: Mary Shelley, Liz Lochhead, and the monster / E. Douka Kabitoglou.
Throughout history, her work would be interpreted in light of her complex relationships with the women in her life, establishing a family in the new romantic tradition, and how it became a touchstone for body horror very familiar to women and to mothers in particular. Her work was the first time a major female intellectual wrote expressively about the thin line between what was dead versus alive, what was safety versus what was dangerous, and what was feminine versus what was masculine.
Mary's famous mother died giving birth to her in a spiral of both creation and destruction. It's been 225 years since that birth. This author allowed generations after her to have a voice in portraying trauma and disintegration as aspects of real life.