About the Author:
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), born in London, was the only child of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In her seventeenth year she eloped to the Continent with Shelley, and after living with him for two years, she was married to him when his first wife, Harriet, had committed suicide. In the summer of 1816 Byron, Shelley, and Mary were living on the banks of the Lake of Geneva; and the Shelleys often passed their evenings with Byron at his house at Diodati. Having during a week of rain amused themselves with reading German ghost-stories, they agreed to write something in imitation of them. Thus began Byron's tale of the Vampire, which Polidori, his physician, completed and published as his patron's. But the most memorable result of the story-telling compact was Mrs Shelley's romance of Frankenstein, recognised on its publication in 1817 as worthy of Godwin's daughter and Shelley's wife. After the death of her husband, Mrs Shelley— who was left with an only surviving son to inherit the baronetcy—returned to London, and devoted herself to literary pursuits, producing Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck, Lodore (1835; largely autobiographical), and other works of fiction, none of which merited the success of Frankenstein, though several of them contain admirable passages. Her last book was a record of her travels with her son in Italy and Germany. She was buried at Bournemouth.
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