Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

• Daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft
• republican ideals
• feminist for womens education independence
• died about 11 days after birth of Mary
• and William Godwin
• egalitarian state, free of laws and govt,
  organized in small communities where worked and
  studied daily
• both against legalized marriage (married 5 months
  before Marys birth)

1797-1851
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

• published her first poem at age 11
• at 16 ran away with married Shelley to France and
  Switzerland
• wrote Frankenstein at 19
• out of 4 children only one survived
• Percy drowned in a boating accident (1822)
• Mary died in 1851
• Frankenstein considered a major gothic work and
  the first science fiction novel

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Other titles

• The Last Man (1826) the end of civilization,
  gradual destruction of human race, seen as a
  total corrosion of patriarchal order
• also
• Mathilde (1819, not pub. until 1959)
• Proserpine and Midas, mythological drama (1820)
• Valperga (1823)
• The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830),
• Lodore (1835), Falkner (1837)
• Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844)
• a variety of short stories, essays and poems

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Frankenstein (1818, 1831)

• The Authors introduction
• Waltons letters why does Shelley frame the
  novel with Waltons letters?
• what issues/themes do they raise?
• the scientist and discovery
• benefit to mankind
• glory
• the question of education
• parent-child relationship/responsibility
• gender characteristics / separation of sexes
• class
• friendship/isolation
• man vs. nature
• reliability of narrative transmission
• How are these issues developed in Frankensteins
  narrative?