Mary Shelley, 1797–1851
Biographical note
Novelist, born in London, the only child of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, his wife. In 1814 she went to the Continent with P.B. Shelley, and married him two years later. When abroad she saw much of Byron, and it was at his villa on the Lake of Geneva that she conceived the idea of her famous novel of Frankenstein [1818], a ghastly but powerful work. None of her other novels, including The Last Man and Lodore, had the same success. She contributed biographies of foreign artists and authors to Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia, and ed. her husband’s poems.
[From A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature by John W. Cousin, 1910]
Works
- History of Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters Descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni [1817]
- Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus [1818, 1831]
- Mathilda [1819]
- Valperga ; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca [1823]
- Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley [1824]
- The Last Man [1826]
- The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck [1830]
- Lodore [1835]
- Falkner [1837]
- The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley [1839]
- Contributions to Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men [1835-39], part of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia
- Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 [1844]
- Proserpine & Midas : two unpublished Mythological Dramas / edited with an introduction by A. Koszul
