PRESENTATION NAME

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• The story of how the book came to be written by
  Mary Shelley is almost as mysterious and
  convoluted as the story Frankenstein itself
  tells. It too is a story of beauty and terror,
  ambition and disappointment, intellectual
  reaching and fear of knowledge, love and hate.

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• Mary is named after her mother, Mary
  Wollenstonecraft Godwin.  Both of her parents are
  well-known radical philosophers and writers.
• Ten days after Mary is born, her mother dies.

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• When Mary is four, her father remarries.  The new
  Mrs. Godwin is something of the stereotypical
  "wicked stepmother."

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• Perhaps in defense of her chaotic family life,
  Mary spends a sheltered childhood, reading and
  studying in her father's vast library. 
• One of her favorite haunts is the yard of St.
  Pancras Church, where she likes to sit and read
  at her mother's grave.

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• Meets Percy.an author and a follower of her
  father's political philosophy.

• At fifteen Mary

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• But he is already married

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• The next year, in June, they are introduced again
  and fall wildly in love. 
• Mary and Percy meet secretly in the cemetery at
  her mother's grave. 
• That July, when she is sixteen, they run away to
  France. 
• She is disowned by her father. She continues to
  study literature and philosophy, with Percy as
  her teacher.

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• During the next year, Mary has a premature baby
  girl, Clara, who dies at four weeks old. 
• She is haunted by dreams about her dead baby,
  dreams of bringing it back to life.  

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• When she is eighteen, Mary and Percy vacation at
  the Villa Diodati in Switzerland.  The weather is
  unusually stormy.  Mary, Percy, and their friends
  entertain themselves by telling ghost stories. 
  They challenge each other to write even better,
  more frightening tales.  Mary starts a story
  based on her dream . . . .

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• Percy's wife commits
• suicide.
• Mary and Percy marry.

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• At nineteen, Mary finishes writing her ghost
  story.
• She credits her husband for encouraging her to
  write.
• Just before she turns twenty, Mary Shelley
  publishes Frankenstein.

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Forever in Love

• For the author of Frankenstein, her life has
  become legend. Legend has it that, several years
  later, while vacationing in Italy, Percy decides
  to experience the power and beauty of nature by
  taking a boat out in a raging storm. He doesn't
  know how to swim. The boat wrecks. Percy's body
  washes up on shore.

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• Several weeks later, Percy was exhumed and placed
  on a funeral pyre built by Byron on the beach.
  Because he was preserved in lime, his body burned
  quickly with a fierce, bright flame. Mary was too
  overcome with grief to attend.

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• In the days before photography, it was not
  unusual for friends and family to choose
  non-decomposing body parts, like bone or hair, of
  the dearly departed as mementos. Byron had wanted
  Percy's skull, but that disintegrated in the
  fire.

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• Another friend, Thornton Hunt burned his hand
  when grabbed what he believed was Percy's heart.
  Sometime later, after a heated argument with
  Mary, it appears that Hunt gave the heart to her.
  It was found after her death, wrapped in silk in
  her writing desk, where Mary had kept it for 30
  years.

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• Can the maker also be the monster?
• Can a monster also be a maker?

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Prepare to enter the unknown.