Valentine's Day History's Romantics Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley




Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley



Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1797 - 1851



Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The only child of the famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher and novelist William Godwin, both influential voices in Romantic-Era England, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin fell in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was only 16; he was 21 and unhappily married. In the summer of 1816, the couple was living with Shelley's friend and fellow poet, the dashing and scandalous Lord Byron, in Byron's villa in Switzerland when Mary came up with the idea for what would become her masterpiece — and one of the most famous novels in history — Frankenstein (1818). After Shelley's wife committed suicide, he and Mary were married, but public hostility to the match forced them to move to Italy. When Mary was only 24, Percy Shelley was caught in a storm while at sea and drowned, leaving her alone with a two-year-old son (three previous children had died young). Alongside her husband, Byron, and John Keats, Mary was one of the principal members of the second generation of Romanticism; unlike the three poets, who all died during the 1820s, she lived long enough to see the dawn of a new era, the Victorian Age. Still somewhat of a social outcast for her liaison with Shelley, she worked as a writer to support her father and son, and maintained connections to the artistic, literary and political circles of London until her death in 1851.


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