"Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!" Mary Shelly from Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Wollstonecraft Godwin) (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British writer. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft who died ten days after her birth. She is best known for her historical and Gothic novels. Her book Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which a scientist creates life in human form, is a lasting inspiration to other writers, filmmakers and scientists.
Started as a ghost story and inspired by a conversation Shelley had overheard between her husband Percy Bysshe Shelly and Lord George Gordon Byron talking about galvanism, it soon became one of the first best selling works by a female author. It is still widely read today and has inspired various adaptations to the stage and screen.
None of Shelley's novels matched the power of her first legendary achievement. Her later works include LODORE (1835) and FAULKNER (1937), both romantic pot-boilers, and unfinished MATHILDE (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, and the first authoritative edition of Shelley's poems (1839, 4 vols.). Shelley's well-received travelogue RAMBLES IN GERMANY AND ITALY appeared in 1844. She also attempted a biography on Shelley but abandoned the work.
The story of Frankenstein's monster has inspired over 50 films.
Read more about her here, here and here.
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