Clara everina shelley

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

Born: 1797 Died: 1851 British novelist From: Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism.

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Born in Somers Town, London, on August 30, 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the only child of Mary Wollstonecraft, the educational theorist and pioneer for women's rights, and William Godwin, the anarchist philosopher and bookseller. Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to Mary. She was brought up with her mother's other daughter, Fanny, whose father was the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. When Mary was three years old, Godwin married his next-door neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont, who introduced her two illegitimate children into the household: Mary Jane, who became known as Claire, and Charles. Mary acquired another half sibling when Godwin's second wife gave birth to William. With her sister Fanny she attended a "Dame School", the popular name given to a certain type of infant school run—often haphazardly—by an elderly lady, and then, for seven months in 1811, Miss Caroline Petman's school at Ramsgate, where the daughters of Dissenters were educated. While at home, Mary had access to her father's library and tutelage, benefiting from the historical books he wrote for children. Visiting tutors gave her lessons in art and French, in which she became fluent. Other languages she acquired included Latin, Greek, Italian, and some Spanish.

In June 1812 Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was sent to Dundee for her health and stayed at the home of William Baxter, who had supported her father during his opposition to the Treason Trials of 1794. The house at Broughty Ferry overlooked the romantic scene of a 15th-century castle. In the 1831 introduction to her most acclaimed novel, Frankenstein, she wrote that trees and mountains were where her imaginative works were fostered. Mary stayed with the Baxters, who became a second family, for 16 months. One of the daughters, Christina, made a return visit with Mary to the Godwins in London. The day after their arrival on November 11, 1812, they are believed to have met the young Romantic poet and aristocrat Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was accompanied by his wife, Harriet Westbrook, and her older sister. Mary resumed her sojourn in Scotland until March 1814 when, on returning to the Godwin household, she found that Shelley had established himself as a firm favorite with her sisters. He was also a disciple of the writings of their father, to whom he gave financial assistance, a circumstance later fictionalized in hershort story "The Parvenue" (1836). The poet also revered Wollstonecraft (her mother, also a poet), whose works he and Mary are reputed to have read aloud at her graveside as their romance blossomed. William Godwin disapproved of their union as Shelley was still married and his wife was expecting their second child.

On July 28, 1814, the lovers eloped to France, taking with them Mary's half sister Claire. Mary later published a version of her journal account of their travels as the jointly authored History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), which was also a travelogue of the inner Romantic journey. The impoverished trio wandered around Europe, which had been ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars, returning to England in September. On February 22, 1815, Mary gave birth to a premature daughter, who survived for just 11 days. In her journal she recorded a dream of the baby coming back to life. This ties in with the theme of reanimation, which characterized some of her fiction, most notably Frankenstein.

Between September 1814 and July 1815, the couple stayed in a series of lodging houses before settling at Bishopsgate on the edge of Windsor Great Park, which furnished in part the setting of Mary's third novel, The Last Man (1826). While living there, she gave birth to their son, William, in January 1816. The following May they departed for Geneva with Claire Clairmont to rendezvous with Lord Byron, who was spending the summer in Switzerland. Their destination had been determined by the fact that Claire was pregnant with Byron's child and hoped, at the very least, for his paternal support. The convergence of Byron, his physician John Polidori, and Shelley's party would lead to a cross-fertilization of literary production culminating in the publication ofFrankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

As Mary Shelley explained in her introduction to the revised edition of Frankenstein in 1831, her inspiration for the novel had been the idea for members of the group to tell each other ghost stories of their own invention. According to Mary's anonymous account as given to Thomas Moore in his Life of Lord Byron (1835) the great poet had suggested that they should all contribute to a book, which his fame would help sell. This entertainment took place in 1816 at Villa Diodati at the side of Lake Leman in Geneva, Switzerland, during that "wet and uncongenial summer" (Shelley 1980, 7) as Mary wrote in the 1831 Preface to Frankenstein. These adverse weather conditions had come about due to the activity of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, south of Borneo, which proved to be the most violent volcanic eruption in recorded history. This had resulted in the coldest summer on record, which ironically precipitated the forging of Frankensteinfrom the heart of a volcano.

The night of the ghost-story writing proposed by Byron might have been June 13, when the group had been driven indoors by an electrical storm. Lightning has been associated in the popular imagination, mainly through film adaptations, with the genesis of Shelley's monstrous birth myth. In her 1831 introduction, she indicates how a conversation about galvanism had helped spark her creativity. Byron's guests diverted themselves by reading some German ghost stories translated into French, entitled Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions de Spectres, Revenans, Fantômes, etc.; traduit de l'allemand, par un Amateur (1812), which, according to the preface of the 1818 edition "excited in us a playful desire of imitation" (Shelley, 1980, 14). Two of these, "The Death-Bride", about a spectral lover, and "The Family Portraits", in which a portrait comes to life, influenced Mary's creation along with her "waking dream", which probably took place on June 16. Her tale of a creature created out of the parts of cadavers, which would seek vengeance upon its creator, would emerge as one of the most powerful and enduring myths to explode out of the gothic tradition.