Saturday, April 22, 2017

Mary Shelley


Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born August 30, 1797, in London, England. She was the daughter of the early feminist and author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"(1792), Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who won a place in "literary history" for his novel "Caleb Williams"(1794). Her mother died not even a month after Mary was born due to complications giving birth. Her father remarried and his new wife brought her kids so Mary felt defensive and was almost competing with them for her father's affection. Threatened by the amount of attention Mary was receiving, her stepmother sent her to Scotland supposedly for her "health". This isolated her even more from her father but all the while enhanced her literary imagination as she tells in the 1831 preface of the Standard Novels edition of "Frankenstein". Mary married Percy Shelley who continuously encouraged her to write. When writing Frankenstein, many versions are told but never the same exact way. The Shelley's and Mary's stepsister left for Geneva to meet George Gordon and that's where she began to write "Frankenstein" which actually started off as a short story. Mary was surrounded by a lot of death at one point in her life, with continuous miscarriages and her children dying.

Frankenstein itself is a symbolization of Mary's "new life" in literature, Shelley included direct quotes and references from her older poems and works and has the new text acting as a composite with "new life" same way Frankenstein was created.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, November 13, 1850 to Margaret and Thomas Stevenson. With the goal of fol...