User blog:ARTaylor/220 Years of Mary Shelley

Today marks the two-hundred twentieth birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, best known to the world as Mary Shelley. She was born on this date in Somers Town, London in 1797. She was the second child of feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin. She was raised to follow her father's liberal beliefs following the death of her mother a month after her birth. She eventually met one of her father's followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and fell in love. The two ran off and she got pregnant though the child died during a premature birth. The two eventually getting married after the suicide of Shelley's first wife.



In 1816, the two went to Geneva to spend the summer with poet Lord Byron, writer John William Polidori, and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont. While there, they heard a story where a scientist used electricity to cause a frog's dead limb to move. That night she had a dream where a man performed experiments to reanimate a dead corpse. The next day she began writing a story that would become known as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The book followed Victor Frankenstein who becomes obsessed with overcoming death, creates a man from dead body parts, and faces the consequences of those actions that destroys everything he knows and love. The work, which was the very first piece of science fiction, was a huge hit and has long since become a mainstay of popular culture. This includes the Marvel Comics character and was credited for her work on The Monster of Frankenstein.



She and Percy had three more children though only one survived. Percy eventually died in 1822 when his boat sank. She returned to England and pursued her career as a writer and raising her son. While Frankenstein remains her most known work, she also produced works like Valperga, Perkin Warbeck, The Last Man, Lodore, and Falkner. She remained a political radical arguing for cooperation and sympathy as the ways to reform civil society, in stark contrast to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by her husband and father. She died on February 1st, 1851 from a brain tumor that plagued her the last decade of her life.