Frankenstein: The 1818 Text

About Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (Author) Mary Shelley (1797-1851) the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later during a wet summer on Lake Geneva Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children and further tragedy followed in 1822 when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.Charlotte Gordon (Introducer) Charlotte Gordon is a prize-winning poet and biographer. She received her undergraduate degree in English and American Literature from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Boston University. Since 1986 she has taught creative writing history literature religion and theatre. Her poetry has won many prizes including a Robert Penn Warren Award. Her biography of the seventeenth-century poet Anne Bradstreet Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of Americas First Poet won a Massachusetts Book Award for non-fiction. Her latest book Romantic Outlaws tells of the fascinating and eerily similar lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley.