Mary Shelley

30 August 1797 - 01 February 1851

Standard Name: Shelley, Mary

Birth Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

Married Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Pseudonym: Mary S.

Pseudonym: Mrs Caroline Barnard

MS , long known almost exclusively for Frankenstein, is now being read for her later novels and her plays, as well as for her journals and letters. Her editing, reviewing, biographical, and journalistic work entitle her to the designation woman of letters. She is an important figure among women Romantics, and a channel for the reformist ideals of the 1790s forwards into the Victorian era.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Textual Production	Naomi Alderman	NA writes frequently in the Guardian. For instance, in an article on the televising of Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid's Tale she provides a sketch of utopian and dystopian fiction by women, from Margaret Cavendish
Textual Production	Alice Meynell	She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen inferior to Charlotte Brontë , accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
Textual Production	Percy Bysshe Shelley	PBS made (and Mary Shelley transcribed) the first English translation of Plato 's Symposium to attempt even approximate honesty about its homosexual content. Gonda, Caroline. “Lodore and Fanny Derhams Story”. Womens Writing, Vol. 6 , No. 3, 1999, pp. 329-44. 337
Textual Production	Percy Bysshe Shelley	Peacock's essay had appeared the previous year in the short-lived periodical Olliers Literary Miscellany. Shelley's riposte remained unpublished until Mary Shelley edited his Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments in 1840.
Textual Production	Percy Bysshe Shelley	When Percy Shelley discovered, and was deeply moved by, the story of Beatrice Cenci, he suggested to Mary Shelley that she should write a tragedy on the subject, but Mary was unwilling to do so.
Textual Production	Percy Bysshe Shelley	This treatment of the legend of Psyche reflects his platonic love for Emilia Viviani , a teenage girl who was unwillingly an inmate of a convent. Mary Shelley is relegated to the secondary role of...
Textual Production	Caroline Norton	In 1832 CN began editing the newly-launched La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine. Chedzoy, Alan. A Scandalous Woman: The Story of Caroline Norton. Allison and Busby, 1995. 88 Known both as La Belle Assemblée (which had first appeared in 1806 but had petered out) and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Liz Lochhead	The title poem meditates on Mary Shelley 's creation of her novel Frankenstein (Eyes on those high peaks / . . . [she] sat down to quill and ink / and icy paper)...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Ella D'Arcy	Maurois shamelessly fictionalizes and romanticises Shelley; he is more interested in the life than the works, and the same is of course true of his treatment of Mary Shelley , who begins as a beautiful...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Helen Dunmore	The title poem pictures a man skating on a pond; he has the air, though, of a long-distance rather than a pleasure skater, and the poem imagines him going on forever, mounting the crusted waves...
Travel	Germaine de Staël	Napoleon's escape from Elba sent her back from Paris to Coppet. She was there as Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein on the other side of Lake Geneva. Not until late 1816 did she return...
Wealth and Poverty	Elizabeth Inchbald	Mary Shelley made some interesting comments on her attitudes to money. According to Shelley EI 's life was . . . spent in an interchange of hardship and amusement, privation and luxury, and her character...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.