Mary Shelley led a life nearly as tumultuous as the monster she created. The daughter of free-thinking philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, she lost her mother days after her birth. She clashed with her stepmother and was sent to Scotland to live with foster parents during her early teens, then eloped with the married poet Shelley when she was Mary Shelley gave birth to five children, but only one lived to adulthood.
Mary was only 24 years old when Shelley drowned in a sailing accident; she went on to edit two volumes of his works. Aside from her earnings from writing, she lived on a small stipend from her father-in-law, Lord Shelley, until her surviving son inherited his fortune and title in She died at the age of Although Mary Shelley was a respected writer for many years, only Frankenstein and her journals are still widely read.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! The game is On January 1, , following a New England Patriots touchdown against the Miami Dolphins, Doug Flutie enters the game for what initially appears to be a two-point conversion play. In , a gigantic volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia choked the air with ash and dust. The eruption killed roughly , people in its immediate aftermath, but the overall toll ended up being much higher—it is now considered to be the deadliest volcano eruption in history.
The next summer, the warm growing season never came. Instead of sunshine, most of Europe was covered in fog and even frost. Crop failures stretched across Europe, Asia and even North America for three years afterward.
Famines, epidemics and political revolts followed. Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley was among them—but when she arrived at Lake Geneva in May , she was looking for a vacation, not literary inspiration. Unfortunately the weather was so ghastly in Switzerland that she was trapped inside nearly the entire time.
Mary traveled with her lover, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, their four-month-old baby and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Most recently he had divorced his wife and, rumor had it, continued an affair with his half-sister. Plagued by gossip and debt, he decided to leave Europe. He was still married to his first wife when he and the teenaged Mary fled England together that same year. The couple was accompanied by Mary's stepsister Jane.
Mary's actions alienated her from her father who did not speak to her for some time. Mary and Percy traveled about Europe for a time. They struggled financially and faced the loss of their first child in Mary delivered a baby girl who only lived for a few days.
The group entertained themselves one rainy day by reading a book of ghost stories. Lord Byron suggested that they all should try their hand at writing their own horror story. It was at this time that Mary Shelley began work on what would become her most famous novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.
Later that year, Mary suffered the loss of her half-sister Fanny who committed suicide. Another suicide, this time by Percy's wife, occurred a short time later. Mary and Percy Shelley were finally able to wed in December She published a travelogue of their escape to Europe, History of a Six Weeks' Tour , while continuing to work on her soon-to-famous monster tale. In , Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus debuted as a new novel from an anonymous author.
Many thought that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written it since he penned its introduction. The book proved to be a huge success. That same year, the Shelleys moved to Italy.
While Mary seemed devoted to her husband, she did not have the easiest marriage. It was his coming of age. Why did I live? The Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model considers only the former, which makes for a weak reading of the novel. For abolitionists in England, the Haitian revolution, along with continued slave rebellions in Jamaica and other West Indian sugar islands, raised deeper and harder questions about liberty and equality than the revolution in France had, since they involved an inquiry into the idea of racial difference.
Godwin and Wollstonecraft had been abolitionists, as were both Percy and Mary Shelley, who, for instance, refused to eat sugar because of how it was produced.
Percy Shelley was among those abolitionists who urged not immediate but gradual emancipation, fearing that the enslaved, so long and so violently oppressed, and denied education, would, if unconditionally freed, seek a vengeance of blood.
It was this production that George Canning, abolitionist, Foreign Secretary, and leader of the House of Commons, invoked in , during a parliamentary debate about emancipation. Nat Turner was called a monster; so was John Brown.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was dead by then, her own chaotic origins already forgotten. Nearly everyone she loved died before she did, most of them when she was still very young. Her half sister, Fanny Imlay, took her own life in Percy Shelley drowned in Nurse the baby, read.
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